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Holistic Guidance - The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir
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List Price: $25.95
Our Price: $17.13
Your Save: $ 8.82 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 283.092
EAN: 9780393059847
ISBN: 0393059847
Label: W. W. Norton
Manufacturer: W. W. Norton
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 352
Publication Date: 2008-05-19
Publisher: W. W. Norton
Studio: W. W. Norton
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Editorial Reviews:
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"An unsparing portrait of a glamorous but elusive father and his daughter's search for the truth about his secret life."—Sylvia Nasar
Paul Moore's vocation as an Episcopal priest took him—with his wife Jenny and a family that grew to nine children—from robber-baron wealth to work among the urban poor of postwar America, prominence as an activist bishop in Washington during the Johnson years, leadership in the civil rights and peace movements, and two decades as the bishop of New York. The Bishop's Daughter is a daughter's story of that complex, visionary man: a chronicle of her turbulent relationship with a father who struggled privately with his sexuality while she openly explored hers, and a searching account of the consequences of sexual secrets. With a depth of questioning that recalls James Carroll's An American Requiem, this memoir engages the reader in the great issues of American life: war, race, family, sexuality, and faith. 22 photographs.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Tale of Love
Comment: I happen to have had the good fortune of meeting Ms. Moore in school, many years ago and we have remained in touch sporadically over the years. Can I be objective because of my relationship? Yes and no...I have other friends who have written books and I am predisposed to like them, that said, some I like better then others, reporting to you that I love Honor and I truly loved her latest book. Found it very moving and respectful, not a "Mommy Dearest", loose liped memoir at all. Wonderfully written, evocative, funny and sad and above all written with a full heart. One of my favorite reads in the last few years. Bless her and Mom and Pops too.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dirty Laundry
Comment: I wish that the author of this book had enough income from her trust fund that she didn't have to write and publish a book like this. There is an incredible amount of private information in this book that should never have been made public. Honor Moore has dishonored her family.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Bishop's Closet
Comment: Honor Moore could teach Freud himself a few things about family relationships. The first of nine children of a marriage between a privileged Episcopal priest and his well-born wife, Honor from an early age longed to get inside the dynamics of her parents' life together.
Coming as it does while the Anglican (Episcopal to Americans) church is in the midst of a controversy about the roles of gays and lesbians, her memoir is especially instructive about the way sex and gender play out in this ecclesiastical world. It is also a cautionary tale about the ripple effect of dishonesty nurtured in closeted homosexuality.
What makes this memoir so compelling, however, is not that Honor Moore outs her iconic father, Paul, the bishop, but her gentle but relentless search for the factual and emotional truth about her parents' multiple liaisons and her own. Meticulously, she recounts her childhood awe of her father's spiritual identity, separate from the one he assumed around the rectory. In his clerical garb, he was apart, but even more than she knew was hidden.
The years the family spent in Jersey City during the late fifties and early sixties in a ministry that involved all its members formed her character and created the image of her father as a dashing activist priest aware of the roots of racism and poverty. She speaks dispassionately of the huge family fortune that provided some respite for the family and enabled her father's ministry. He called it his cross of gold. She would say, I think, that the cross he and his family bore was of a different nature.
Aside from its political implications, this memoir is a deeply personal exploration of Christianity and the erotic and worth reading no matter what your sexual or religious orientation.
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Summary: A susbstantive memoir
Comment: Of the summer's two "gay Episcopal" memoirs -- the other being Gene Robinson's book -- I found Honor Moore's by far the more substantive. Nearly all of us wrestle with our parents, and the more charismatic and larger than life they are, the more likely it is that this wrestling will leave us wounded. Honor Moore courageously shows us her wounds (and her wonder) as well as her father's complexity and her mother's humanity.
Moore opens a window onto the significant social pressures Episcopal clergy once faced to sunder their sexuality from their spirituality -- conservative evangelicals take note -- and this alone makes her book a valuable contribution to church social history.
The real beauty of the book, however, lies in its depiction of two parents and their eldest daughter trying to live their lives as authentically as they can. This is difficult in any era, no matter what the current social prejudices, and if none of the three quite succeed as much as we would have wished, their journeys are no less moving.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Father/Daughter Search For Understanding
Comment: In the memoir, The Bishop's Daughter, the life of Bishop Paul Moore is explored by his daughter, Honor. From an early age, Honor has tried to understand her feelings for her father. At first, she seems to worship him, describing how as a young man he had a religious experience that turned him away from his family's wealth and toward service of God. Being wounded in WW II seemed to cement his conviction in serving God as he returns a decorated hero, bearing scars from a bullet that just missed his heart. God has saved him, he believes, for a purpose, and he is chosen Bishop of the Episcopal Church, a man respected as a paragon of virtue, a spokesman for the poor and a defender of rights.
Bishop Moore was a wealthy man, but not a happy one. His first wife described him as "the most unhappy man" she ever knew. He is estranged from Honor, the oldest of his nine children, and only at a late age, when he is diagnosed with a terminal illness, do the two strive to reconcile.
While describing her father's two marriages, his fights against racial injustice, and his ascent through the church, Honor also richly describes her own battles. Sexual experimentation and secrets are threaded through the story as both father and daughter explore their bi-sexuality, their sexual freedom, and the consequences. The book explores in detail the efforts of both the bishop and his daughter to hide their secrets. After her father's death, Honor goes further, meeting his long-term male lover and trying to understand his reasons for hiding this loving relationship.
This book covers many important issues of our times: race, sex, faith, politics, war, and family. A beautifully written memoir, it includes many elements of biography and autobiography. The writing is simple, clear, and enlightening. Some of the details are unpleasant, but honest. I was pleased with the way the two lives are explored and then joined together in a truth they could both understand at the end.
by Rhonda Esakov
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women
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