Seminary Boy - Rated 
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.
A departed age - thank God! - Rated 
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.
How did well-meaning people subject very young adolescents to such treatment!
Like John I was extremely devoted to what I believed was my "calling", but unlike him I was desperately unhappy, suffering terrible homesickness. This I "offered up" as part of the sacrifice to be made to become a priest.
Eventually I did end my seminary studies and like John became lukewarm about the Church.
After thirty years I resumed my studies for the priesthood in a rather different orientated church and am now practising as a (rather scarred) priest.
This is why I find his experiences such an true account of what so many youngsters were subjected to in their desire to serve God.
The only thing he does miss out on is the marvellous education, academically, that these institutions delivered to many who would never have made it to a grammar school.He benefited from that as have others who have ended up in quite exalted university positions.
Totally absorbing - Cornwell writes so well - Rated
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 of being taught by nuns and Christian Brothers during roughly the same time period evoked a Catholic childhood which has left its indelible stain. Cornwell draws you into his seminary life and this in itself must have been a tremendous catharsis. One is left wondering about the characters that were a formative part of Cornwell's experience and what might have happened to them after leaving the seminary at short notice. A Catholic upbringing helps to understand some of the spiritual aspects of Catholicism, but even from a pure autobiographical point of view, Cornwell has probably inadvertantly left a useful documentary of East End life after the War, which provides a balance between the rigours of seminary life with the even grimmer details of Catholic working class family life.
A balanced account - Rated
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.
Don't miss this beautifully written memoir - Rated
John Cornwell's memoir combines a very particular childhood with an important piece of social history that mustn't be lost. You don't need to have had a catholic upbringing to be able to identify with many aspects of Cornwell's upbringing - painful, funny and often poignant. I defy anyone to be able to put it down without getting to the last page.
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