Well-written and relentlessly self-aware.
An introspective, decidedly un-cheery work that seeks to set the author’s record straight.
After Armstrong wrote an account of her seven years as a Catholic nun (Through the Narrow Gate, 1981), she followed it up with a cheery but admittedly untruthful memoir depicting her new life outside the convent (Beginning the World, 1983). Now, to describe the turnings her life took as she struggled to find her way in a secular world, Armstrong (Islam, 2000, etc.) adopts the image of a spiral staircase as a symbol of spiritual progress in T.S. Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday. First as a student at Oxford, where she earned a B.A. and M. Litt., but failed to obtain a doctorate, and then as a teacher in a private girls’ school in London, a position from which she was dismissed after a few years, she was what can best be described as an emotional wreck. Fainting spells while still in the convent progressed to episodes of amnesia and panic attacks, which led to years of useless sessions with psychiatrists, anorexia, even a suicide attempt and hospitalizations. Finally, in 1976, a physician recognized her epileptic seizures for what they were and put her on appropriate medication. At a loss as to how to make a living after losing her teaching job, Armstrong was in despair when publicity surrounding her first book brought her TV work. An early disastrous appearance convinced her that she could not make a career out of being an ex-nun, and when a chance to write a low-budget documentary on the early Christians came along, she grabbed it. By 1983 she was in Israel researching her subject. Exposure to Judaism and Islam while in the Middle East set her on a new course: writing about the historical development of the three great Abrahamic faiths, and in doing so examining her own ideas about religion, spirituality, and God. From her teenage search for God in a convent and her subsequent attempts to debunk religion, Armstrong struggled to clarify her own beliefs. What matters, she concludes at last, is not dogma, or right belief, but right action—in a nutshell, the Golden Rule.
Well-written and relentlessly self-aware.Pub Date: March 8, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41318-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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