Poignant and passionate look at the city church, inside the walls and out.
Account of an unusual urban Ash Wednesday.
San Francisco Food Pantry founder and director Miles (Jesus Freak: Feeding Healing Raising the Dead, 2010, etc.) shares her experiences and musings from Ash Wednesday in 2012. A resident of San Francisco’s Mission District, the author encounters a level of diversity within a few blocks of her home and church that rivals almost any other urban neighborhood in America. It is within such a setting that she goes about the job of ministering, under the auspices of an Episcopal church, to the larger community. Much of her story is a lead-up to her journey outside the confines of church walls, when she took the ashes of Ash Wednesday out into the neighborhood, offering ashes on the street corners throughout her neighborhood. Despite her anxieties about this very public celebration of liturgy, the event turned out to be a joyous and touching experience. Miles is deeply committed to her urban neighborhood and toward radical involvement in the life of the city. In fact, everywhere she looks, she is reminded of “the movement,” a waning countercultural thrust spawning everything from socialist bookstores to gay street patrols. Given the nontraditional backdrop of the Mission, Miles’ Episcopal chants and rituals seem out of place and even jarring, yet everywhere she went on this Ash Wednesday, she was met by people eager to partake in the ceremony. Along the way, she introduces colorful characters, both from the fringes of society and from the depths of San Francisco activism. An intriguing read, Miles’ account will resonate most with those who live in and love the inner city. Though the author recognizes that religious experiences are global and varied, she is unapologetic in proclaiming, “for me, it’s cities that make the presence of God most real.”
Poignant and passionate look at the city church, inside the walls and out.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4555-4731-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Jericho Books/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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