Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.
Novelist and memoirist Johnson (Geography of the Heart, 1996, etc.) details his journey from bitter skeptic to man of renewed faith.
Like the best writers on religion, Johnson never flinches at describing his own doubts, anger, and skepticism about its practices, but he is also scrupulously fair and open-minded. Raised Roman Catholic in a family of nine, he stopped believing in his teenage years and as a gay man is angry with his church for its attitudes about homosexuality and sex. Early in 1996, he accepted an invitation from a brother at the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky to attend an international convocation of Buddhist and Christian monks and lay contemplatives. He thought the experience might be useful for a novel he was planning, but instead found himself embarking on “a cross-country journey through the briars and thistles of faith, and (its traveling companion) desire,” searching for “what it means to have and keep the faith.” As Johnson records his experiences, memories of his past mix with accounts of his stays at Gethsemani and at two Buddhist centers in northern California. He observed and participated in the daily rituals, learning to meditate and work in silence with the Buddhists, attending the various services each day at the Monastery. Seamlessly blending personal experiences with historical and theological research, making numerous references to the Bible and Buddhist writings, as well as thinkers from Augustine and Plato, the author explores the connections among Christianity, Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Eastern religions. The early Christian church accepted women as equals, he writes, but today’s male-dominated organization has failed in its handling of desire and sexuality. Despite such criticisms, as his journey nears its end, Johnson has regained his faith, understanding now that belief is not a narrow creed, but “a form for and discipline of the imagination that preserves and promotes faith.”
Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-00442-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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