A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.
A biography of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).
Huffington Post senior editor Emling (Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science’s First Family, 2012, etc.) offers an interesting and readable, though otherwise unremarkable, biography of St. Catherine, who entered the world in a time of violence, plague, and religious unrest. From her earliest years, Catherine showed an uncanny piety and devotion to her faith and to the established Catholic Church. She had her first vision of Christ at age 6, committed herself to a vow of virginity at age 7, and was regularly fasting soon after. Her life of 33 years would be marked by extreme self-denial—she often existed only on the Eucharist—and almost pathological desires for physical suffering and martyrdom. While barely in her 20s, Catherine jumped fully into the church politics of her day, encouraging the pope to vacate Avignon, France, and return to Rome and encouraging a crusade against Islam. Unfortunately, Emling does not confront the rather obvious question of how an uneducated woman in a thoroughly patriarchal world managed to address the political issues of her day and even win the admiration and devotion of popes and other leaders. Catherine managed to do the seemingly impossible in the course of only a few years, and yet the author presents her remarkable influence without asking how it occurred. Similarly, Emling’s portrayal of Catherine is entirely uncritical, even to the point of being fawning. The author fails to pose obvious questions about Catherine’s mental health and the veracity of contemporary sources. There is no doubt that general readers will find the book fascinating in many ways: Catherine lived a remarkable life and left an interesting story. However, Emling relies on the work of prior writers and offers little new in terms of either original research or unique approach.
A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-27980-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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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