Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1788024 in Books
• Published on: 1998-03-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .98 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

From Amazon.com
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 delineates a decades-long journey toward self-knowledge and peace with her past: it's a very American saga, sensitively told.

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.

From Booklist
Wilson's novel, If You Had a Family , heavily mined her Christian Science background: reared in the faith's ultraorthodoxy by her own superdevout, inflexible mother, the protagonist's mother relies too long on her faith, postpones seeing a doctor, and dies of cancer. In Blue Windows, Wilson removes fiction's facade and tells the gritty truth about her cancer-stricken mother, who attempted suicide, a guilty reaction to her self-perceived failure of faith: she drank Drano and thereby gave her doctors the task of skin-grafting her face back together to repair acid burns on her mouth, lips, tongue, and chin. After her death, Wilson's father married Bettye, who redecorated rooms and tried to redecorate lives; she forced Wilson into a puke-pink room and shut the girl's bookcase away in a closet. With time, Wilson made painful peace with her childhood and her mother's death. Her searing memoir deserves to find a mainstream audience well beyond the loyal following for her lesbian mysteries. Whitney Scott