Seminary Boy
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Review
‘“Seminary Boy” is a complex story written with beautiful and brutal exactness…an intensely involving, carefully paced book by one of the most thoughtful and well-informed of Catholic writers. A story about the loss of faith and its eventual return, it has the hold of good fiction and the grip of sober truth.’ Guardian
‘What makes it so gripping (and it is one of the most gripping memoirs I have read for years) is its incisive style.’ Sunday Times
‘Apart from its beautiful writing, what stamps “Seminary Boy” as a classic story of growing up is the kaleidoscope of perspectives it offers on the mystery of being…Layer after layer of art and truth compete for your attention, and the ambiguities are intrinsic to the power of the writing.’ Spectator
The First Post
'Beautifully written.'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
This is a beautifully evocative account of life in a small Catholic boarding school in the 1950s, set at the head of a lush, green valley in North Staffordshire in the UK. The author shows rather than tells us what it was like to live within the walls of this College whose intake was a mixture of lay boys and boys who. like Cornwell, intended to go on to study for the priesthood, and whose teachers were mainly priests who had themselves been pupils at the school, who, in turn, had been taught by priests who ... going back two centuries to the foundation of the school in penal times, by priests who had been trained at the English College in Douay, Flanders, founded by Cardinal Allen in 1568. The traditional spirituality of this place, with its extraordinary history of Catholic recusancy, was intense,inspiring and heroic, but also isolating in its interior privacy and moral anxiety, in a way that Cornwell brings out very vividly in his descriptions of his own lonely scruples and adolescent sexual anguish. There are many poignant and shrewd vignettes of well-meaning teachers who seemed to suffer and transmit the very moral anxiety that Cornwell himself suffered from. This is not simply an account of a time long past but, on the contrary, it shows in detail and from experience the deeply rooted attitudes that have cast a long shadow over the subsequent history and contemporary troubles of the Catholic Church.
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Writen by Frank Furlong - I found this one of the most enjoyable memoirs I have ever read - and biographies are my favourite reading matter. JC has captured the essence of a piece of social history which no longer exists and he gives a sympathetic pictute of the life and personalities of the time. Young boy's are no longer taken away from home to be trained for the priesthood. Candidates these days must have some experience of life. But speaking as one of the boys concerned I must congratulate JC on his entertaining and very readable account of a way of life which no longer exists.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
A well-written and very moving memoir. I was gripped from the start by the author's ability to 'hold me in' to his story, and by his excellent writing. A truly superb book and one that I would definitely recommend.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
a thoroughly good read
Well written and remarkably gripping. I have read three of John Cornwell's books now and have enjoyed them all. He is a first class writer.
Published 12 months ago by Mungo
A departed age - thank God!
I found this book engrossing and rather moving. Perhaps this was because I went through many of the same experiences at the same age at another junior seminary. Read more
Published on 12 May 2007 by Rev. D. Sutcliffe
Totally absorbing - Cornwell writes so well
This was absolutely riveting and I enjoyed sharing these moments of John Cornwell's life. Although not experiencing the same schooling within the junior seminary, my own experience... Read more
Published on 12 Jan 2007 by Stanley J Marut
Don't miss this beautifully written memoir
John Cornwell's memoir combines a very particular childhood with an important piece of social history that mustn't be lost. Read more
Published on 26 Oct 2006 by Emily Glencross
Spiritual Journey, Memoir and History
Seminary Boy is a stunningly written memoir, and compares with Edmund Gosse's Father and Son. I have never read such a gripping, deeply affecting spiritual journey written... Read more
Published on 24 Oct 2006 by S K Wilson
Truth
Even though I have read only a little of this book I can assure sceptical readers that this is the truth. Read more
Published on 6 Sep 2006 by Calvin Rückkehr
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