A plodding, shallow account of a year in the Christian life.
Harvard grad and social activist Breyer’s tale of her first year at an Episcopal seminary in New York City fails to illuminate.
Stringing together a series of disparate anecdotes about seminary life, the author never gets around to providing a coherent overview or deeper understanding. In one potentially fascinating scene, Breyer describes attending a retreat in Connecticut at which a Father Stephen tells the future ministers that popular culture today offers a confusing and ambiguous message about what priesthood is supposed to be. Instead of following up with her own thoughts on the nature of priesthood in the 21st century, the author digresses into an unrelated tale about a tragedy that struck Father Stephen’s parish. Similarly, Breyer notes that, in January, many of her classmates report experiencing a sort of culture shock during Christmas break, finding it difficult to leave the seminary cocoon and attend their parents’ churches. This presents an obvious opportunity to consider the relationship between a calling to ordained ministry and the rest of one’s life, but Breyer ignores it. Readers are left to wonder how her Jewish dad (Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer) reacted to her call to ordination and, more broadly, how wearing a dog collar affects everyday conversation and interactions with strangers. Breyer’s treatment of her commitment to social justice is equally disappointing; she describes getting arrested at an Episcopal Day protest, but doesn’t elaborate on why she participated or how she felt about incarceration. The sacrament of marriage gets short shrift too. Breyer arrives at seminary fresh from her honeymoon, but says nothing about her marriage as a spiritual journey. She hints that her husband does not share her enthusiasm for Christianity, but never tells us how spirituality affects their relationship, or vice versa. The closest she comes is her admission that Greg gets annoyed when she opts for studying over cleaning up the kitchen.
A plodding, shallow account of a year in the Christian life.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-465-00714-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2000
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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