Finally, Sebba dares to ask why Mother Teresa has been so lionized in the West, suggesting that her apotheosis has much to...
This surprisingly nuanced biography of the international icon of humanitarianism neither shies away from nor revels in controversy.
Sebba, a British journalist and author of a children's book on Mother Teresa, has laced this biography with thought-provoking ethical questions. Though the book jacket promises to reveal "the truth'' about Mother Teresa's friendly relations with the Duvaliers of Haiti, her unscrupulous financial dealings, and other salacious tidbits, the book itself intelligently transcends the genre of the muckraking biography. Part I is a straightforward chronological narrative of Mother Teresa's childhood in Albania, her early association with the Loreto order, and her 1947 exodus from it to found the Missionaries of Charity. Part II outlines some of the criticisms the order has endured in the last decade; political and fiscal dealings aside, some of the most damning charges have been lodged by the international medical community regarding the quality of care provided in Mother Teresa's facilities. Stories of unhygienic conditions abound. One volunteer reported seeing a nurse using the same filthy rag to wipe the bottom of one baby, then the nose of another; the same needles reportedly provide injections to multiple patients; and painkillers are often not prescribed, even to the terminally ill. Sebba probes beneath the surface of these allegations to discover their root in Mother Teresa's theology of suffering. The nun has indicated repeatedly that she finds a redemptive value in suffering, and Sebba sees this as a potentially dangerous sentimentalization. She also discusses Mother Teresa's much-publicized opposition to abortion and contraception, and ultimately concludes that her absolutist stance against contraception makes her social ministries more of a Band-Aid than a cure.
Finally, Sebba dares to ask why Mother Teresa has been so lionized in the West, suggesting that her apotheosis has much to do with assuaging white guilt for India's grinding poverty.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-48952-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
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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