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 In this newly publish memoir Sister Helen tells of her childhood, of taking vows and joining the Sisters of St. Joseph of Medaille, and of her life fighting for the abolition of the death penalty. The book stops at1982 when she met Patrick Sollier, whom she had previously written about in Dead Man Walking. You may have read (or seen the film) of this riveting account of their friendship while he was on death row and when she accompanied him to his execution in 1988.
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 This was just the right book for me as I rush around handling my busy life before two weeks as a solitary travel in Rome and Florence. I will be easier to become invisible amongst the tourists at St. Peter’s Square or on the Ponte Vecchio than if I were to wander off on the Tuscan countryside. I can’t wait to be conscious of disappearing.  What is it like to grow up in what you thought was a white middle class family with your natural parents and two younger brother only to discover at age twenty-seven that your dad is not your biological father and that your birth father was black? Sarah Valentine, who grew up Sarah Dunn, offers a compassionate and honest memoir of what that was like for her, writing about her personal discoveries as a biracial woman as she searched for her biological father.  The story of five diverse people and their history with trees throughout their lives, from a personal tree in their back yard to their responses to saving trees in the world. Full of compassion but also a darkness creeps into their stories. As that happened I found myself not picking up the book and then deciding not to read the last 250 pages of this 500 page deep and important story.  A story of compassion for women minimized because they are women, in this case Albert Einstein’s first wife, Meliva, a brilliant scientist in her own right. According to this fictional tale, she may have been the Einstein who actually conceived the theory of relativity. Was she was born at the wrong time in history, or married to the wrong man, or both?  A story of two brothers, Arthur and Jake, sons of a farmer in the 1930s, during World War II, and into the 1950s in rural Ontario, Canada. The jealousy, rivalry, passion, and compassion of the two brothers is seen through the eyes of Ian, the teenage son of the town’s doctor, who later in the story takes his father’s place. Very compelling story that kept me reading. A new favorite author for me.  This story is narrated by the bird artist, and young man in rural Nova Scotia in the early 19th century. Like the other stories I’ve read by Howard Norman, there are no heroes. All the characters we meet are flawed and yet also are kind and compassionate. Like all of us, the are doing the best they can. In the not perfect lives of all his characters, Norman offers them redemption.  This book is filled with brilliance and compassion. Historian Pagels weaves a lifetime of Biblical study to conclude that we can’t understand why good and the bad things happen, but we can live and learn with them as we sit in the mystery of God. Thirty years ago her three year old son died of a heart condition; a year later her husband died in a hiking tragedy. I took Pagels all those years to work through her beliefs about the truth of all that happened. Writing publically was a necessary part of the process for her, and in doing so we are all helped along the journey.  A new favorite author for me. Norman weaves the variant personalities of those who find their lives intertwined with each other—those usual way that include family, geographical location, and happenstance. Nothing new here, just life happening-- the particulars vary, but the human depth and nuance of each person is universal. This is a story of ‘every man’. Howard Norman tells it well.  A comforting love story between newlyweds Margaret and David, between William, Margaret’s father and David’s father-in-law, and between the love of each of them from swans. A heartening and a challenging novella. You won’t be disappointed. |
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