Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 352 pages
- Published by: Picador; 1st Picador USA Pbk. Ed edition March 15, 1998
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 0312180543
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-0312180546
-
Book Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.5 x 1 inches
- Weighs: 14.1 ounces
Product Review
Frequently caricatured as the religion that rejects medical treatment, Christian Science gets a balanced, nuanced appraisal in this memoir by a writer who grew up within the faith. Barbara Wilson appreciates Christian Science's unusual openness to women, who gained self-respect and status as its practitioners and healers, but she bares its inadequacies in a wrenching account of her mother's battle with cancer, suicide attempt, and eventual death. Her precise, unsentimental prose shows a decades-long journey toward self-knowledge and peace with her past: it's a very American saga, sensitively told.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Christian Science, a belief system with over one million adherents, pivots on the premise that the material world, and therefore physical illness, is an illusion. Recently, its consequent doctrinal rejection of conventional medicine has led to government prosecution of several church members whose children have died because of the refusal of such treatment. Wilson (Trouble in Transylvania, LJ 10/1/93) here recalls her childhood as the daughter and granddaughter of Christian Scientists, focusing on her crisis of faith as a 12-year-old, triggered by the mental breakdown and premature death of her mother. (Wilson told this story previously in her work of fiction, If You Had a Family, LJ 10/1/96). Despite the potentially provocative subject matter, bathos here conspires with a paralytic writing style ("The picture is by Norman Rockwell, or would be, if he'd painted it") to undermine the work. A better Christian Science memoir is Thomas Simmons's The Unseen Shore (LJ 5/1/91). Wilson's work is a marginal purchase.?Bill Piekarski, Southwestern Coll. Lib., Chula Vista, Cal.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader Reviews
My father was raised in a household of three women. His mother and aunt were CS, his grandmother was not. He respected women all his life and at a time (the 50s) when few men did. Long after he abandoned his childhood faith he respected the CS determination, optimism, and power of both sexes to achieve worthwhile goals. Wilson's book helped me understand why he was able to do that.
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