Blue Windows by Barbara Wilson (2)

From Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the Church of Christian Science, to Deepak Chopra, Americans have struggled with the connection between health and happiness. Barbara Wilson was taught by her Christian Scientist family that there was no sickness or evil, and that by maintaining this belief she would be protected. But such beliefs were challenged when Wilson's own mother died of breast cancer after deciding not to seek medical attention, having been driven mad by the contradiction between her religion and her reality. In this perceptive and textured memoir, Wilson surveys the complex history of Christian Science and the role of women in religion and healing.

-----
Amazon.com 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 delineates 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.