Rating: 
Summary: A life-changing book
Review: I loved almost everything about this book. I loved the writing. I loved the insight. I loved the people I met inside it. (The only thing I didn't like was the title!)I have to confess: I am generally a big fan of spirituality books, especially autobiography. My favorites include Anne Lamott, Richard Lischer, and Richard Foster. Girl Meets God ranks with those authors' books because not only is the story good, and the writing delightful--the author is so honest. It was refreshing and **freeing** to read a writer saying "This is where I am. I love God. Soemtimes I slip up, and sometimes I doubt." If you like contemporary spiritual writing, don't miss this book.
PS I have to disagree with the last reviewer. He seemed to miss the point of the chapter he is describing. Lauren has a delightfully self-mocking tone about her own insecurities and affections for fishnets and single malts. That tone is part of what makes her so likable!
Rating: 
Summary: Few Have the Courage to be This Honest
Review: This woman is killer smart, funny, and immensely entertaining. I have met few people who are this candid in person; I have never seen anyone this honest in public. She creates these beautiful constructs, the conclusions of which go straight to your heart, making you cry because you are more than you were and you know she speaks the truth. Thank you Miss Winner.
Rating:
Summary: A wonderful spirtitual autobiography
Review: A must read for any young person struggling to figure out his or her relationship to God and to a faith tradition. Winner is honest, penetrating, irreverent, funny, and at times deeply moving in her account of her journey toward and with God.
Rating: 
Summary: Not ready for prime time
Review: Afraid I can't recommend this, the latest addition to the "pop spirituality, soft fizz Christian dicscovery memoir" genre. Miss Winner writes of her "evangelical" Christianity with a sort of condescension that gives one the impression this book is more about "girl" than "God." She strains to separate herself from the fundamentalists (home schooling Republicans, etc.) lest she lose her sophistication (I drink single malt scotch! I even KNOW what single malt scotch is!) Yet, she looks at the rubes who actually take the Bible literally and says, "These are my people." I doubt she'd ever get her hands dirty with them, though. The writing is servicable, but not transcendent (not a good thing for a spiritual memoir). The comparison to Anne Lamott has been made, but Winner is no Lamott. The latter is a truly great writer who is also extremely funny. Winner's style is more strained, her insights less, well, insightful. Also, it's a bit odd to have a 30-something writing a memoir like this. She spent her young adult years in an ivory tower. Lamott has actually lived life, she's older, she has credibility. Someday, Miss Winner may have some of that herself. Not yet.
Rating:
Summary: Good Spiritual Reading, Good Story
Review: The basic plot: young woman, commited Jew, is gradually drawn to Christianity, evnetually converts, and then (as she put it) has to put her life back together again. This memoir, though, is not just for those with a peculiar interest in Christian covnersion or Jewish-Christian relations. This memoir is for those who are interested in the ups and downs of leading a spiritual life. Lauren Winner doesn't claim to have all the answers, she doesn't claim to be perfect or righteous (She has trouble makign herself pray regularlly, for example), she just claims to be on the path. Anyone else who is on the path to a spiritual life will find her an affable and consoling companion.
Rating:
Summary: A Wonderful Book!
Review: I relate to Lauren so much! What I like about her book is, although I don't know the author personally, I feel that I know her now and could sit down and talk to her about her life, experiences, thoughts, and feelings for hours. It's a wonderful book and I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: an exploration of one Gen-Xer's spiritual self-indulgence
Review: While I expected this book to offer fresh insights, I found its unpredictability to be most predictable and somewhat tiresome. In her well-known oeuvre, Winner presents herself as the voice of a sexually and intellectually liberated evangelical Christian sub-culture. This book chronicles her spiritual journey as she reconciles her family's religious heritage (and other options) with her own needs or wishes. In the end, she seems to be dining from the salad bar of religious traditions, picking and choosing those that suit her needs or desires at any one time. Her ultimate disposition disregards aspects of religious traditions which tie her down intellectually, socially, and even sexually. I find it most intriguing that Winner, not yet 30-years old, is so world-weary she has needed to write a memoir. While her subject matter is different, her literary positioning and cerebral posturing remind me of other self-important bete-noir belletrists, such as Katie Roiphe. But perhaps the lesson to be gained from Winner's highly unique and personal journey of faith is that each one of us is different. I think I would have been better off doing and searching on my own than reading about her own journey steeped in rationalizations and intellectual self-indulgence.
Rating:
Summary: Richly textured, witty, and honest
Review: Imagine you're a young American woman, a recent convert to orthodox Judaism and a PhD candidate at Cambridge University in England, and one night Jesus comes to you in a dream. Wouldn't you want to write it down? Lauren Winner has, and her life's story (thus far) is an absorbing and enlightening one. The daughter of a lapsed Baptist mother and a non-observant Jewish father, she spends her youth alone at a Reform synagogue. Through Potok's The Chosen and her study of Judaism she first romanticizes Orthodox Judaism, then is drawn into the faith. While at Columbia University, though, she can't seem to shake an academic fixation on American Protestant religious history. Thus while wearing long dresses, eating kosher food, and becoming deeply immersed in Orthodox Judaism, she studies Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. Unable to shake this near obsession with Christianity, she is, in fits and starts, drawn to Christ through a number of influences (one of which, she is ashamed to admit, being Jan Karon's At Home in Mitford). A couple of years and one theophany later, now at Cambridge, she is baptized in an Anglican chapel. Though the book's chapters aren't chronologically assembled, which can be a bit confusing, the narrative is loosely held together thematically and is told in such a playful, sexy (yes, sexy), yet honest voice that critics are calling her writing Anne Lamott-esque. Told through a series of loosely related personal essays titled after Christian and Jewish festivals, Winner artfully draws you into her journey. She tells of her estrangement from many of her Jewish relationships; her not-so-earnest struggle with chastity; her visceral distaste for, yet deep appreciation of, the evangelical sub-culture; and throughout includes many moving reflections on the church, liturgy and the Incarnation. Most pressing, though, is her longing to make sense of Christianity's Jewishness - and most of the book, and thus her life, centers around this theme. Though Winner is not your typical convert to evangelical Christianity, her story is perhaps the most captivatingly eccentric and honest "conversion narrative" I've come across. Unabashedly bookish, brutally honest, deeply religious, and endlessly endearing, she delicately handles the two interwoven faiths with care, humor, and lots of learning - appreciating the distinct fabric of each but recognizing, and sorting through, their true kinship: "on Ascension Day, I am struck by the deep similarity that lies just underneath that difference. Both Jews and Christians live in a world that is not yet redeemed, and both of us await ultimate redemption. Some of us wait for a messiah to come once and forever; others of us wait for Him to come back. But we are both stuck living in a world where redemption is not complete....We are both waiting." Though there are other avenues by which one can begin to understand the kinship of Christianity and Judaism, it is a unique opportunity to be able to experience the richness and shortcomings of both faiths through a 21st-century Gen Xer's personal journey. Though some may object to aspects of Winner's forwardness, her depth of insight and quirky style make one appreciate once again the richness and complexity, as well as the Jewishness, of the Christian faith.
Rating:
Summary: Crass Self-Promotion
Review: While Winner is clearly a gifted writer who discusses her various spiritual conversions in vivid prose, one gets the uncomfortable feeling that she would become a Buddhist, a Zorastrian or anything else if it would make her more marketable as a young hip religious writer. While others have certainly written of (and, yes, profited from) their spiritual journeys, Winner has an aggressively off-putting "hey, look at me -- I'm the next great quirky religious chick" style. One hopes she has finally found her spiritual home. Her relentless search for acceptance with a religious community, with men, with anyone is sad and depressing.
Rating:
Summary: Who's Afraid of a Spiritual Book?
Review: Although BOOKS ABOUT GOD and SPIRITUAL GUIDES scare and sometimes intimidate me,I am always interested in reading open, honest explorations of religion and spirituality. My favorite--seems like everyone's favorite--is Anne Lamott's Travelling Mercies. On the basis of one book I dare not compare Lauren Winner to Lamott, whom I adore in every genre, but Winner is certainly a strong competitor. I love the personal way she approaches the reader, almost like reading a diary, but more fluid.
"Sometimes, often, prayer feels that way to me, impersonal and unfeeling and not something I've chosen to do.I wish it felt inspired and on fire and like a real, love-conversation all the time, or even just more of the time. But what I am learning...it is a great gift when God gives me a stirring, a feeling, a something-at-all in prayer. But work is being done whether I feel it or not." I also appreciate the way she approaches the subject matter with grace and humor, never strident, even when making her individual beliefs clear. A wonderful book and a writer to watch.
|
