Entertaining essays on the inspiring work various sisters are accomplishing in the world.
How a group of sisters is making changes in the world.
If the word nun brings to mind an elderly woman in a black habit, Wall Street Journal contributor Piazza's (Love Rehab: A Novel in Twelve Steps, 2013, etc.) essays on the ten sisters she interviewed will definitely create a new image. Dynamic, vivacious, determined, peaceful and loving are just a few descriptors that could be applied to these women who have devoted their lives to God and to some of the most difficult causes in America. Sister Simone spent weeks at a time on a bus traveling across the country to protest the Republican budget that would have denied health care to the poor; Sister Megan, 82, broke into a high-security nuclear facility to protest nuclear weapons and warfare; Sister Jeannine risked the wrath of the Catholic Church to bring religious teachings to gay and lesbian Catholics. Other nuns work on saving women and children from the massive sex-trafficking market both in the U.S. and around the world. Another sister brings hope to women in prison, provides a home for their children until they're released, and continues to support the ex-cons after prison by giving them a home, food, clothing and an education. Piazza questioned each woman's motives and decision to become a nun, and many responded that they felt it as a deep calling at a young age and was the right thing to do, despite the challenges of being a nun in today's world. The women use prayer, meditation, exercise and a good diet to help them fight the negativity and stress they encounter on a regular basis, even from the church they belong to and devote their lives to supporting. Reading these stories may not convert anyone, but they should challenge plenty of stereotypes.
Entertaining essays on the inspiring work various sisters are accomplishing in the world.Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497601901
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
