Although David Foster Wallace doesn't act the way an author should, his brilliant new book is filled with desperation, loneliness and addiction. Ivory Tower Hard to stomach At Berkeley and Pitt, student activists stopped eating. Interview Wall Street lynching Falsely accused of bilking millions, a black bond trader talks about the frat-boy culture of high finance.
Nuns hold an irresistible fascination.
Whitney gets too muddled in her own tangents at times, but the slow dawning of her own change of heart is a gently affecting thing to behold. Whitney charts the women's histories from their earliest inklings of a vocation through either their continued service, working with the Northwest's neediest, or the relinquishment of their vows. Whitney is candid in detailing her own complicated relationship with both Catholicism and the women who instilled its tenets in her, but her thought process is too raw and convoluted on the page. She zigzags from her own history to that of the convent to those of the nuns in a manner that can only be described as slapdash. She freely talks about her agent and her editor, but their presences would have been far better appreciated if they'd been seen less and felt more.