Category: Non-Fiction Reviews

TATTOOS ON THE HEART, by Gregory Boyle

In this uplifting and intimate memoir, Jesuit priest Gregory Boyle recounts his three decades of working with “homies” in the barrios of East Los Angeles, an area with an extreme concentration of murderous activity, including over 1,000 gangs with almost 90,000 members. I was by turns mesmerized, horrified, and enthralled as I read.

In each chapter, we benefit from Boyle’s hard-earned wisdom, inspired by his faith, serving alongside the gang members and loving them as Jesus intends us to love others (our neighbors), amply demonstrating the impact that unconditional love and compassion can have on lives. Father Greg, or G-Dog as he is called by the homies, saw the need for a rehabilitation center and started Homeboy Industries in 1986 to provide jobs, tattoo removal, job training and encouragement for members of rival enemy gangs. Their motto, printed on tee shirts is “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

Homeboy Industries has grown to a $8.5 million headquarters, housing Homeboy Bakery, a beautiful Homegirl Café, a catering service, various craft industries, and a Homeboy Diner.  It currently employs about 300 former gang members, daily serving about 1,000 customers, and monthly provides 500 treatments for tattoo removal.

The book distills his experience working in the ghetto into a breathtaking series of stories which capture and convey the lessons he learned from kids who have struggled through challenging times and tried to turn around their lives. In each Chapter the reader benefits from Boyle’s wonderful, hard-earned wisdom. With an ear for dialogue, he deftly captures the expressive flavor and colorful language of the Spanglish patois spoken there.  That alone makes Tattoos of the Heart remarkable literature.

The individual stories he tells are woven into parables that will break your heart, as many are about young gang members who start to get on track, only to be randomly shot and killed. It’s difficult to keep a dry eye. Manny was a boy covered with tattoos caught in the crossfire of gang warfare and died on the emergency room operating table. He had enrolled in community college, but was cut down before he ever attended a class.  A nurse who was evidently disgusted by his tattoos, told another “Who would want this monster’s heart?” The other nurse reacted angrily, “How dare you call this kid a monster. He belonged to somebody.  Shame on you.”

Then there was Jason, a young crack dealer, the son of two addicts, who, after rejecting several of Boyle’s invitations, finally got a job with Homeboy Industries. He left his anger behind him, eventually had a home and family, and was looking forward to his daughter’s baptism and had bought her a new dress. But then he was gunned down in the streets.

Luis, also a drug dealer, came to Greg after his daughter was born. He was hired to work in the bakery.  He got a car, a home and a whole new life. One evening, while loading his car, he was shot and killed by some gang members who ventured into his neighborhood barrio.

There are other stories like those of Manny, Luis, and Jason, kids who Greg befriended, turned their lives around, looked to the future with hope, only to end up one more victim of the violence of the LA streets.

But then there are other stories of some who turned their lives around. Bandit came to see Greg after being locked up for selling crack. Boyle got him a job in a warehouse, and Bandit got married and had three kids.  He told Greg he was proud of himself, showing people were wrong who called me a “Bueno para nada” (Good for nothing).

Boyle sees beyond these experiences and reminds us that we are all deserving of God’s love. These young people are not monsters, but scared kids who want a purpose in life. He challenges the reader to “stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” This is a holy book about the power and impact of unconditional love and compassion.

Considering that he has buried more than 150 young people from gang-related violence, many of which he has known since childhood, and called them by the names their mothers used, the joyful tenor of the book remains an astounding literary and spiritual feat. Tattoos on the Heart, which reminds us that no life is less valuable than another, is destined to become a classic of contemporary spirituality. But, be careful — reading it may change your thinking, and your ministry!

—Ken Johnson

P.S. The book left a tattoo on my heart too.

The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writer’s Life, by Amy Tan

Amy Tan’s mother believed in ghosts and curses and lived her life expecting bad luck. A typical maternal warning:

“Don’t ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can’t stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.”

Her father was a Baptist minister who was guided by his Christian faith. His approach:

“Faith is the confident assurance that something we want is going to happen. It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us even though we still cannot see it ahead of us.”

So Tan lived her life amid contradictions, in a home full of invited and uninvited ghosts, holy and otherwise.

After reading this compilation of essays about her life, it’s easy to believe that the connection between other worlds is far more tenuous than most pragmatic Americans like to believe. Tan has used bits and pieces of her life in her fiction, especially her relationship with her mother, But she was holding back some of the most bizarre elements of her story:

Her friend and classmate Pete was brutally murdered when they were in graduate school. Amy communicated with him in dreams so vivid she learned the names of his killers. And he told her to leave school and start a career in writing that ultimately led to her novels, which include The Joy Luck Club, The Bonesetter’s Daughter, and The Kitchen God’s Wife.

Tan’s mother spent three years in a Chinese jail for having an affair while she was married. When she got out, a chance meeting reunited her with the man with whom she had an affair, and the two got married and became Tan’s parents. Her father died young, of a brain tumor, only months after losing his son and Tan’s brother, also to a brain tumor.

Tan’s mother’s morbid obsession with death no doubt stemmed from watching her mother kill herself by eating raw opium.

Because the book was built out of existing work—magazine articles, speeches, introductions to other books, even long emails—it is a bit disjointed, with repetition of several stories and too little details on others. It came out a year after Tan was diagnosed with Lyme disease, which weakened her physically and mentally. Perhaps she felt she would not recover well enough to write a formal memoir.

She recently published Where the Past Begins: A Writer’s Memoir, another series of essays, although she’s not comfortable with being a memoirist. In an interview with The New York Times, she said:

“It’s like taking the mask off, taking your clothes off, and having people say, oh my God. It’s nonfiction, and people can make fun of the way you think or say, oh that was trivial.”

Clearly, her life has been remarkable and far from trivial, but it’s possible she might be accused of being unbelievable. As she notes in The Opposite of Fate, her truth is far stranger than fiction.

—Pat Prijatel

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy, by Anne Lamott

For people who have read Anne Lamott’s previous writings on faith and life, this book will come as no surprise.  It continues her own confessions, struggles, insights, longings, and gropings toward understanding herself and a fuller relationship with God and with her fellow human beings.
 
For those who have not read any of Lamott’s earlier books, pick this one up.  Lamott writes with humor and unfailing honesty as she confronts her own (and our) human greed and selfishness and love and honor and, yes, mercy.
 
Woven throughout are her own takes on various Bible passages and people that may well resonate with the reader.  They certainly do with me.  Listen to her about St. Paul with whom I have long had a difficult relationship:
 
“Putting aside the little problem with all the people he had killed, he was annoying, sexist, stuffy, and theoretical.  He was not a great storyteller like the Gospel writers. He often got preachy, and his message was frequently about trying to be more stoic, with dogmatic ‘Shape up’ and ‘Shame on you’ talks.  He was cranky, judgmental and self-righteous, worse even than I.  Yes, he had moments of genius and light, but then he’d start wagging his fingers again.  Yet, he knew my heart, he knew the struggle with our dark side:  ‘I do not understand what I do.  For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.’  And he preached the willingness to be loved and included, as is.  He knew that people like me would want to have the willingness to have the willingness, but that this is scary and hard.  He knew that it comes from the pain of staying the way we are, cut off from ourselves, squandering our lives, envying others, bingeing on whatever, terrified of making mistakes.”
 
Lamott explains that it is mercy – the promise to offer and receive relief and forgiveness – that lies at the heart of all great faith traditions and our own spiritual identity.  Mercy gives us the chance to “soften ever so slightly” so that we can understand one another more deeply.  Mercy is, in her words, “the medicine, the light that shines in dark places.”
 

This book is beautiful, with so many wonderful passages that beg to be read and savored, pulled close into your heart and pondered there.  Read it.  You won’t be disappointed.—Jeanie Smith