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