SAINT THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX

Name: SAINT THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
Author: Kathryn Harrison
ISBN: 0-670-03148-8

by Kathryn Harrison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2003

“Saints don’t become saints by choosing paths of moderation and tolerance,” Harrison writes in this bright, sharp essay on...

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An admirably even-tempered biography of Thérèse Martin, canonized as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux a scant 28 years after her early death.

Thérèse was not a winning child, writes novelist/essayist Harrison (Seeking Rapture, p. 361, etc.); she was “priggish, humorless,” and by the age of seven had made and lost the only friend she was to have. Raised in a family of utmost piety—all five daughters entered the convent—she considered games a form of penance and “occupied herself with funerals for dead birds.” Her mother held the sentiment that “only fools look for comfort in the present,” and Thérèse concurred. Harsh separations marked her early years—her mother died when Thérèse was a child, and her much-loved oldest sister entered the convent. Thérèse became weepy and relentlessly emotional, viewing every pleasure as a possible corruption. She experiences an apparition of the Virgin Mary (Harrison notes that visions were popular at the time), but she’s able to look the miraculous event in the eye and keep it distanced. “Whether this means it issued from or was delivered to her psyche is a question without a single answer,” she writes, though she credits it as a leap of creativity. She is a bit more suspicious of the swiftness of Thérèse’s transformation from scourge to vessel of substitutive suffering, between mortal and divine, living and dying: “Grace, alchemy, masochism: through whatever lens we view her transport, Thérèse’s night of illumination presented both its power and its danger.” Harrison detects a whiff of pride, and later the exploitation of “invalidism.” Pursuing an obliterating union with Jesus, Thérèse intended herself to be unknown and counted as nothing—though she did produce a three-volume work of autobiography, pensées, and poesy that became a bestseller and generated a cult following after her death from tuberculosis, in 1897, at 24.

“Saints don’t become saints by choosing paths of moderation and tolerance,” Harrison writes in this bright, sharp essay on the ever-difficult Thérèse.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003

ISBN: 0-670-03148-8

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2003

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
ON SUNSET
by Kathryn Harrison

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUE CRIMES
by Kathryn Harrison

- BOOK REVIEW
JOAN OF ARC
by Kathryn Harrison

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006

Well-told and admonitory.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BUSINESS

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NIGHT

by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.