Reviews for What Does My Future Hold?: 99 Ways to Plan Your Future

The average rating for What Does My Future Hold?: 99 Ways to Plan Your Future based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-07-23 00:00:00 KHALIL MAHDI Fascinating and well-written. Harris is an agnostic Jew (interesting factoid: Franz Werfel, who wrote The Song of Bernadette was also Jewish), and is a Fellow of New College, Oxford. She flatly states that it is not possible to decide if Bernadette Soubirous actually saw the Virgin Mary at what became the pilgrimage center. However, she is drawn to the young girl and her experience, particularly admiring the way in which the 14 year-old, uneducated Bernadette dealt with the aftermath of her apparitions. Harris takes the reader from the initial visions in 1858 to the eve of World War I. She examines the role of the Church hierarchy, Imperial and Republican France, peasant piety and Pyreneean traditions in the formation of the shrine. Harris does not gloss over the shameful tradition of anti-Semitism that permeated 19th and 20th century French Catholicism, along with legitimist politics. But she demonstrates that the uglier side of religion was subsumed at Lourdes into the experience of aiding the sick. People united across social classes to ferry the maladies from the trains, to feed them, to bathe them, to care for their physical and spiritual needs. Harris also examines the physical effects of suffering upon self-definition. She is especially interesting here, as she tends to reject the late 19th century rational explanation of the cures as simply the power of suggestion. There is also a substantial discussion of the role that women played both within and without the development of the pilgrimage site. Moreover, Harris provides a much broader understanding as to the definition of "cure", as it was only in the 1880s that these became subject to medical "verification". She aptly points out that by allowing the existence of a Medical Examination Board, the Church surrendered part of her power to science. Bernadette herself removed rather quickly from the Lourdes phenomenon, as she left her home village in 1865, never to return. Prior to the entrance into a convent at Nevers, Bernadette had been separated from her village for long stretches of time, limited in the contact allowed with her family. She died young after an uneventful afterlife as a nun, perfectly willing to speak about the apparitions if asked, but never bringing them up herself. It was in the interests of the Church to focus the pilgrims upon the Virgin herself, rather than the visionary, and Bernadette --- contrary to the behaviors of others in similar positions that Harris describes --- seems to have been more than content with that outcome. Harris also contrasts the figure of Bernadette --- poor, ignorant, not French (she --- and her vision --- spoke using a patois peculiar to the region) -- with the bourgeois Therese Martin, i.e. St. Therese of Lisieux. I did wonder why the figure of Joan of Arc, also an uneducated French shepherdess, never really came up in the book. These three girls are the great saints of France. Harris ends her book, though, with this sentence: "For, despite the attempts by some to romanticize, by others to politicize and by more still to medicalize, throughout the history of Lourdes there has always remained one fixed point: the essential image of a young, poverty-stricken and sickly girl kneeling in ecstasy in a muddy grotto."

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-29 00:00:00 Brad Cox Ms. Harris tells the story of the wonderous events in the small town of Lourdes, and relates them to the history of France in the second half of the 19th Century. Her approach is to tell the story of the events through the lives of the people involved. To do so she quotes from letters and diaries as well as official records. In order to write in such depth, she must have read everything ever written during this period about Lourdes. Between the Notes and the Bibliography at the end of the book is a three page Dramatis Personae listing all the major people associated with the shrine. Not just for Catholics, the book devotes many pages to the role of women in 19th Century France and will be of great interest to anyone wanting to know about women's rights in France. It is also a "must read" for people interested in French social history. She also looks into the relationaship of anti-Semitism to the Catholic piety of the time. People are never presented two-dimensionally to represent the ideals or concepts they championed. Ms. Harris treats the people she writes about with respect and intelligence. As for Bernadette's vision and the miracles, she tells what is known (and she knows a lot!) and the reactions they caused without taking a stand one way or the other herself. Truly a great work of historical writing.