A well-written but unrelenting memoir that portrays the strictures and darkness of a conservative sect.
A group of renegade Catholics takes over a young girl’s life in this debut memoir.
In the early 1960s, Vatican II abandoned the traditional Latin Mass and tried to foster a spirit of ecumenism and liberation. This repelled some traditional Catholics, some of whom turned toward leaders who would preserve what they saw as the old ways; one such leader, Bishop Francis Schuckardt, founded an extremely conservative sect that appealed to the author’s parents. They sent their young daughter to the sect’s boarding school, where, for several years, she says, she witnessed and experienced physical and psychological cruelty. She writes, for example, that she saw her own brother being made to walk on his knees through rocks and gravel as a punishment for giggling; other kids, she says, were taken to “the spanking room”; and at another point, she was told that the hamburgers that she and other girls were eating had been gathered from the trash. Schettler also writes that she heard accounts of drug use and sexual abuse in the community. Meanwhile, the sect’s authorities often hid things from the students, she says, which fostered a sense of social isolation: “We were told only what the superiors wanted us to know,” she writes. This is a grim, emotionally challenging story that shows, in intimate detail, how life in the sect cut the author off from the natural joys of youth. Having grown up in circumstances where she had to constantly “mortify” her eyes, the author repeatedly depicts how the sect twisted her ardent spirituality. The author later became a nun, and she details how she spent much of early adulthood in thrall to feckless and ineffectual superiors. This book will particularly appeal to survivors of cult experiences, as it effectively describes the path the author took through a world of suffocating, distorted religious ardor.
A well-written but unrelenting memoir that portrays the strictures and darkness of a conservative sect.Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-692-33197-2
Page Count: 211
Publisher: Lifelong Habits LLC
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The text in this debut memoir/cookbook is nothing short of charming and recalls Zarela Martinez's Food From My Heart. O'Higgins paints her pre-Castro Cuban childhood in idyllic colors and calls a lost world to life. Family photographs add to the sweet, personal feel. However, while the essays and notes benefit from intimate detail, the recipes do not: Many feel like a-pinch- of-this-a-pinch-of-that attempts to nail down techniques that are second nature to the author. For example, directions for fried plantains instruct, ``Fry the plantain slices until they are almost black but not burned'' without giving any idea of how much time that will take—a problem for novice plantain cookers. Variety apparently has never been the spice of life in Cuba: Many of these are more or less similar recipes for the same dish. There are three different black-bean recipes and four for cooking rice, and that's only in the chapter on rice and beans. Another section gives 14 rice entrÇes, most with similar seasonings. O'Higgins warns that Cuban desserts are achingly sweet (because sugar production was the backbone of the Cuban economy, consuming it came to be considered a patriotic act), and she is not kidding. A light eight-by-eight- inch sponge cake is drowned in a cup of port and more than two cups of a supersweet lime-cinnamon syrup. Good reading, bad eating.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-016964-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
In this unappetizing and tacky effort, Philbin and Gifford (Cooking with Regis and Kathie Lee, not reviewed) combine recipes from guests on their hyperirritating morning chat show with those from their friends and family in chapters organized by holiday (Memorial Day, Easter and Passover, etc.). There are some terrific dishes here, but they are without exception those from professionals, like Daniel Boulud, many of whom have written their own, far superior books. Recipes from friends and relatives could have come from a 1950s ladies' auxiliary cookbook: ambrosia fruit salad with marshmallows and flaked coconut, and jelly thumbprint butter cookies that are virtual cholesterol bombs. The overall presentation is sloppy and disorienting, with boxed information often serving to confuse rather than help. What is a definition of wheat berries doing on a page with a recipe for rendering chicken fat? Worse than the food are the coy, name-dropping anecdotes and tips dripping with self-importance. Gifford says that her trick for staying slim is ``doing an exercise video'' because ``thousands of people will see your fat thighs if you don't.'' Party suggestions sound straight out of the Girl Scouts—for Saint Patrick's Day hosts are instructed to attach an ``O'' to the name of each guest and address them as ``for instance, Mr. O'Steinberg.'' Want to throw the cheesiest party of the year? This is your guide. (First serial to Good Housekeeping; Literary Guild/Better Homes & Gardens Book Club selections)
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1994
ISBN: 0-7868-6067-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
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