A charming and instructive communion with saintly sisters.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Campbell (The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, 2002) relates a provocative life story centered on her experiences as a woman in the Catholic church.
Intertwined with the author’s tale is her autobiography as a reader, her experiences with books by and about various saints who have deeply influenced every aspect of her life. Campbell begins with her college years, when she partied hard but knew she wanted more out of life. Starting out as a journalist, she eventually made it to the Beltway as a speechwriter for President George W. Bush. This period in her life was cut short when she left Washington to get married, a decision she describes as having deeply challenged her faith, feminist values and personal pride. The new couple would also face a struggle with infertility, and soon the hope for a child became an all-consuming passion. “Overnight,” she writes, “the imaginary child I had begrudged for cramping my style became the Holy Grail.” This stress was coupled with her father’s swift slide into Alzheimer’s, a struggle Campbell recounts with palpable emotion. While still grieving her father’s death, the author found out she was pregnant with twins; her pregnancy became a harrowing experience from beginning to end. Throughout the book, Campbell describes how various women saints helped her understand her situation and move ahead. In deciding on whether or not to move to Washington, Mary Faustina Kowalska’s journal helped her to have total trust in God. When struggling with infertility, Edith Stein’s works convinced Campbell to use her maternal gifts to make the world a better place.
A charming and instructive communion with saintly sisters.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3649-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Image/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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