Here If You Need Me: A True Story by Kate Braestrup
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Book Reviews of Here If You Need Me: A True Story
Book Review: Here if You Need Me
Summary: 5 Stars
I enjoyed this heartbreaking, healing and moving book so much that I bought copies of it for everyone for Christmas. I gave most people printed copies but I personally loved listening to it on CD so I could hear Kate's comforting words and prayers. I will always keep it.Book Review: wisdom on paper
Summary: 5 Stars
one of the best memoirs i've read in years and it's my job to read them. this is an act of love. i felt the leaves crunch beneath my feet as kate took me into the wilderness, both internal and external. beautiful.
-lauren elise daniels, prose editor
Book Review: Heartfelt and filled with Love
Summary: 5 Stars
An amazing true story of a woman who truly knows the meaning of the word love. I will read it again and again, because in all honesty, I wish I had Kate Braeshrup in my life.Book Review: Suprisingly Good
Summary: 4 Stars
In truth, I resisted this book for a long time. I saw reviews of Here If You Need Me by Kate Braestrup in some magazines. I also heard her interviewed online. Finally I saw a podcast of her speaking before a group. Then I walked into our local library and the book was sitting on an end display. OK already, I will read the book! In the end, I was pleasantly surprised.
Here If You Need Me is the true story of how Braestrup overcame the sudden death of her husband, took care of her kids, became a chaplain for the Maine Game Wardens, and basically put her life back together. But it is far more than that. It had to be, because I don't normally go for warm fuzzy perseverance stories. For one thing though, Braestrup tells her story honestly but with a sense of humor. She never dissolves into self pity or the woe-is-me attitude that many would. She still asks the hard questions, but she asks them with power.
And that leads to another reason I enjoyed this book. Although she might deny it, Braestrup is a strong women. Outside events may happen to her, but she alone chooses how she handles the events and how she reacts. She refuses to be a victim and in the end actually becomes a champion for the victims. By choosing the road of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister, as her late-husband had planned to do, she explores her faith and her strength. But by becoming a chaplain with the game and wildlife service, she puts that faith and strength to use together with her compassion. She makes a difference, pure and simple.
Here If You Need Me is not a long book and it is not a complicated book, but it is a good book. I would recommend it for anyone trying to find meaning in their life or for those who are trying to help others find that meaning. And truthfully, I would recommend it for people who are simply looking for a good read with a good story line that has some humor and human angst thrown in. And if it jumps on you from the end cap at your library, take the hint.
Book Review: If God Was a Maine-iac...
Summary: 4 Stars
At its foundation, HERE IF YOU NEED ME asks the timeless question: Why? Why does God stand by indifferently while bad things happen to good people? Kate Braestrup brings the abstract musings to concrete reality as she chronicles her sometimes unenviable tasks as a chaplain to the Maine Warden Service. Is there any sense to the deaths she witnesses (after the fact) in the Maine woods, lakes, ponds, and streams? People from Maine are affectionately called "Mainiacs," but Braestrup defends the very God many others question in this book. That defense, along with the mix of upbeat and heartrending real-life stories she shares, make the book worth a trip upstream.
Braestrup doesn't kid herself. By the end of the book, she admits to many paradoxes, including her own. Only through the tragedy of losing her own husband, a state trooper with a dream of becoming a minister, does she herself follow that path and become a chaplain with the Warden Service (a vocation she comes to love). If nothing else, Life -- some might say God -- is ironic. Still, Braestrup would insist, He is love as well.
Perhaps less successful is her blending of abstract, theological questions with rather frank descriptions of the body human (both alive and dead). But there are those who would argue, with some degree of truth, that this is exactly her point -- humans make a fetish of the body at the expense of the soul. Her mission, then, is to bring the corporeal down to size. The trouble? If that sort of thing bothers you, the going may get rough despite all the philosophical smelling salts along the way.
Overall, a worthy effort. Fine writing and an honest voice overcome the sometimes disconcerting jumps of this episodic memoir to create a work that should please both fans of religion and fans of the outdoors. Recommended.