For the benefit of the skeptical would-be faithful (dubbed here “neoagnostics”), journalist Gallagher offers an autobiographical, selectively bicoastal look at liberal religious experience in America today. Gallagher (I.D: How Temperament and Experience Create the Individual, 1996) updates Immanuel Kant’s classic formulation of humanity’s three principal questions (What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope?) to: What is real? What do I feel?, What are my choices? The update reflects the influence of what Gallagher calls millennial religion, by which she means those experiential, nonjudgmental, pluralistic ways of being religious that characterize the spiritual life of some, mostly urban, Americans. (“Millennial” is an unfortunate coinage for this use, since for traditional Christians it implies apocalypse, while for religious non-Christians, who measure time otherwise than from Christ’s birth, it has little currency at all.) Casual and breezy language characterizes much of this self-consciously journalistic romp between such diverse religious centers as Congregation B—nai Jeshurun (a popular synagogue in New York City), the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (also in New York), and the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center (California). Gallagher’s book comprises recountings of worship, meditation, and study experiences she has had at these and like religious institutions, as well as interviews with their respective leaders and flocks. The focus primarily on Judaism, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism reflects the author’s confessed status as a Catholic-bred, meditation-practicing spouse of a Jewish man. The casual style breeds some errors, as in the retelling of the biblical story of the burning bush (which Moses turns toward initially, not away from, as Gallagher narrates), or the medieval Jewish reaction to Maimonides (who in his own lifetime never faced a serious threat of excommunication, as Gallagher implies). But the author has a good ear for the memorable remark, as of the contemplative nun who said of her life, it “is sheer faith most of the time. Very sheer.” An occasionally successful attempt to capture in journalistic prose some varied depths of (post)modern religious experience. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44794-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A unique, incandescent memoir.
A lyrical, soul-stirring memoir about how an acclaimed Native American poet and musician came to embrace “the spirit of poetry.”
For Harjo, life did not begin at birth. She came into the world as an already-living spirit with the goal to release “the voices, songs, and stories” she carried with her from the “ancestor realm.” On Earth, she was the daughter of a half-Cherokee mother and a Creek father who made their home in Tulsa, Okla. Her father's alcoholism and volcanic temper eventually drove Harjo's mother and her children out of the family home. At first, the man who became the author’s stepfather “sang songs and smiled with his eyes,” but he soon revealed himself to be abusive and controlling. Harjo's primary way of escaping “the darkness that plagued the house and our family” was through drawing and music, two interests that allowed her to leave Oklahoma and pursue her high school education at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Interaction with her classmates enlightened her to the fact that modern Native American culture and history had been shaped by “colonization and dehumanization.” An education and raised consciousness, however, did not spare Harjo from the hardships of teen pregnancy, poverty and a failed first marriage, but hard work and luck gained her admittance to the University of New Mexico, where she met a man whose “poetry opened one of the doors in my heart that had been closed since childhood.” But his hard-drinking ways wrecked their marriage and nearly destroyed Harjo. Faced with the choice of submitting to despair or becoming “crazy brave,” she found the courage to reclaim a lost spirituality as well as the “intricate and metaphorical language of my ancestors.”
A unique, incandescent memoir.Pub Date: July 9, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-393-07346-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
SEEN & HEARD
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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