A Cracking of the Heart

Death of Daughter Shakes Conservative Dad: Jim Fletcher reviews David Horowitz’s ‘A Cracking of the Heart’

By Jim Fletcher
December 25, 2009
Originally published at WND.com

As a founder of the “New Left” in the ’60s, David Horowitz unintentionally added to the rich hues of his personality by making an about-face in worldview. Politically, Horowitz today is one of the icons of the conservative movement. His FrontPage Magazine website is a watchdog of both the trendy and vicious left. Horowitz frequently speaks on college campuses and is quite emphatic about the threats to civilization that seem to spring up these days like psychedelic mushrooms.

But it is as a father that Horowitz really shines. In “A Cracking of the Heart,” his new memoir about his daughter, Sarah, Horowitz wonderfully, achingly shares the story of this courageous woman who battled difficult birth conditions to accomplish more than most do with long, gray lifetimes.

In Chapter 1, Horowitz writes that Sarah’s death at 44 left a “wake of vacancy and heartache behind.”

This Horowitz is quite different from the one that writes with acerbic wit and hot daggers about various socialists, huggers of dictators and diabolical change agents that stalk our land. Sarah’s father is a man of great humanity, and this extraordinary book can be a catalyst for anyone enduring the ghastly effects of a loved one’s death.

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A Cracking of the Heart by David Horowitz: Review by Richard Baehr

By Richard Baehr

December 20, 2009
Originally published in the American Thinker

At some point in our lives, we come to understand the concept of death, and then it happens to our family members or friends. In the normal course of events, there is a progression: Grandparents die first, then our parents, and then we go. If we are fortunate enough to have children, then they survive our death.

Some people have a different pattern: their children predecease them. I have never known a parent who lost a child and was not deeply affected by it. David Horowitz is one of those who buried a child. In 2008, his 44-year-old daughter Sarah died suddenly and alone.

Sarah was born with Turner Syndrome, a disease I had never heard of  until I read the book Horowitz has written about his daughter’s life. About one in 2,500 girls is born with Turner Syndrome, and it can make life miserable for those who have it.

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A Cracking of the Heart: A Journey to Transcendence–Review by Cynthia Yockey

By Cynthia Yockey
December 23, 2009
Originally published at PJMedia.com

For those of us who didn’t have the honor and pleasure of knowing Sarah Horowitz, her father has collected her work, insights into her spiritual journey, and his thoughts on his late daughter’s life into a new book. David Horowitz’s^[1]A Cracking of the Heart^[2]refers both to the pain of the death of a loved one and to the opening of the heart to transcendence.

One of the greatest blessings of A Cracking of the Heart is that it also is a dialogue between two insightful souls: an ex-leftist, conservative father and an idealistic, progressive daughter, each wrestling with the questions of how to be good and how to do good from the point of view of their respective philosophies. Both recognized that neither side could hold a monopoly on goodness because, as the author quotes Solzhenitsyn, “the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through the human heart, and through all human hearts.”

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A Daughter Brought to Life: Review of “A Cracking of the Heart” by Jay Nordlinger

David Horowitz’s unusual new memoir David Horowitz has done what few could do: He has written a memoir of a child of his who died (age 44); and he has brought it off beautifully. A Cracking of the Heart makes for raw reading at times, but it also makes for thought-provoking and uplifting reading. It is a very unusual book, written by an unusual man — about an unusual woman — and when I say “unusual,” I mean something positive, no doubt.

Horowitz will need no introduction to readers of National Review Online. A leader of the New Left, he became a leader of the fighting Reaganite Right. He is a thinker and a doer, an intellectual and an activist. His mind ranges widely, and so do his books. He has written about politics and policy, of course. But he has also written about matters literary, cultural, and spiritual. His 2005 book, The End of Time, is a meditation on mortality. A Cracking of the Heart is a meditation too, plus other things.

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