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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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