Unilluminating tale of one woman’s lost faith.
Sentilles (A Church of Her Own: What Happens When a Woman Takes the Pulpit, 2008, etc.) recounts a childhood torn between two faiths—Catholic and Episcopalian—before deciding to become an Episcopal priest. While completing a doctorate program at Harvard Divinity School, the author finally admitted something she had long sequestered in the back of her mind—she does not really believe in God. Less a spiritual memoir than a cathartic exercise, Sentilles places the reader in the unwanted role of therapist as she shares the details of an upper-middle-class life gone awry. What becomes clear early is that the author’s understanding of God never developed beyond the childish concept of deity as a completely anthropomorphic figure, making her graduate studies that much more difficult. Sentilles was obviously not prepared to begin preparation for the priesthood (she admits to having never owned a Bible before entering seminary), and readers will be easily convinced that her faith was based far more upon herself than God. Though filled with unwarranted shame and guilt and plagued with a strikingly low sense of self, Sentilles manages to portray herself as completely self-absorbed at every point in her story: “The good things I did in the world had an ugly underside: I didn’t do them for others. I did them for myself. I did them to make people love me.” As the author moves slowly toward an obvious and inevitable conclusion, she forces unwanted tidbits on readers—the tale of her eating disorder, intimate details from failed relationships with men (“We kissed. He sucked on my toes.”) and even a graphic depiction of her urine test for Teach for America. Finally, after a tortured relationship, Sentilles broke up with God—a God she never saw as more than a boyfriend. A disappointing spiritual memoir.
Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-194686-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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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