Book #107 |
Book: Tattoos on the Heart | Author: Gregory Boyle | |
| Source: Library loan Format: Print |
Pages: 217 | Duration: 11/08/25 – 11/08/25 (1 day) | |
| Rating: ★★★★☆ | Genres: nonfiction, memoir, Christian, religion, spirituality, faith, gangs | ||
| 📕10-word summary: What true compassion looks like — from a gang-intervention program’s perspective. 🖌6-word review: Educational, thought-provoking stories about compelling people. |
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| 💭A favorite quote: “Forget Kleenex. Forget handkerchief. Soledad is sobbing into a huge bath towel. And the few of us there found our arms too short to wrap around this kind of pain.” | |||
| 🎓Some new-to-me words: pyrrhic, recalcitrant, braggadocio, tertianship, Garpian dread, salvific | |||
| Description:* For 20 years, Father Gregory Boyle has run Homeboy Industries, a gang-intervention program located in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles — also known as the gang capital of the world. In Tattoos on the Heart, he has distilled his experience working in the ghetto into a breathtaking series of parables inspired by faith. From giant, tattooed Cesar, shopping at JC Penney fresh out of prison, we learn how to feel worthy of God’s love. From 10-year-old Pipi, we learn the importance of being known and acknowledged. From Lula, we understand the kind of patience necessary to rescue someone from the dark — as Father Boyle phrases it, we can only shine a flashlight on a light switch in a darkened room.*From goodreads.com’s synopsis. | |||
| Thoughts: This book was enthusiastically and highly recommended by a friend. The message in this book is unequivocally a “5-star” one — even to an atheist reader in spite of it being completely steeped in Christian values and beliefs. I wish my rating scale had ½ stars, so I could have given it 4½ stars instead of 4. The “½-star struggle” I had with it was that there are a lot of slang terms in it (many left to decipher by context), and there are a lot of (untranslated) Spanish words/phrases/sentences in it. (Full disclosure: I speak pretty much zero Spanish.) Complicating that, many of the slang terms were in Spanish. While reading this book, I thought a lot about my friend Hugh, who gave his heart to people experiencing homelessness in his Loves Wins Ministry work in the Raleigh, NC area. This seems like the kind of book he could write from the compelling stories and insights he used to share about that work when he was doing it. I’d only recommend this book with some caveats, the main one being with regards to non-religious people. They’d have to be someone who I believe would open their hearts to the message despite the deeply religious wrapper it’s in. With all that said, I’m glad I read it. I found the education about gang-intervention approaches alone worth the price of admission. I also think Gregory Boyle should be made a saint whenever “the rules” (which are quite rigorous) allow it. | |||
See the rest of the books I’ve read in 2025 and previous years: 2024 | 2023 | 2022 | 2021 | 2020 | 2019.
