This sensitive, eloquent coming-of-age story articulates the often painful intersections of religion, power, illness, and death. Mystery writer Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, 1993, etc.) departs from fiction here to unveil her Christian Science upbringing in uncompromising, often disturbing detail. The crux of the book is how family and faith fall apart when the author's mother, a devout Christian Scientist, dies of breast cancer at a relatively young age (and after a failed suicide attempt). Given Christian Science's teaching that illness and death are merely errors of the mind that must be corrected, the family was forbidden to mourn this loss. Such denial meant that grief and anger were channeled into other, often horrifying, modes of expression: her father's remarriage to a sadistic woman and the author's own floundering, which made her receptive to her new stepbrother's sexual advances. In this sense, the book is an unforgettable testimony to the destructive powers of some religious beliefs. But paradoxically, it is also a nuanced acknowledgment of the ways in which sectarian religion orders the chaos of the world, providing new opportunities for its followers. Wilson concedes, for instance, that Christian Science healing continues to provide an important outlet for women, who comprise almost 90 percent of healers. She can also see that Christian Science helped her to define her own strength as a woman—her identity forged not just through surviving her mother's death but through more mundane statements of faith, such as her refusal to accept a school polio vaccine in the 1950s. Historically informed and refreshingly candid—though a bit too long—this offers not just an individual memoir of an increasingly obscure religious movement, but also a more general exploration of the crises of faith and health in the 20th century. (Of particular interest is Wilson's parallel of contemporary guru Deepak Chopra with Mary Baker Eddy.)
Pub Date: March 17, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15066-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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