Livelier and less scholarly than Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning (2001): an engaging work of literary, cultural, and...
British travel writer Nicolson (Sea Room, 2002, etc.) anatomizes the creation of the 1611 English-language Bible, perhaps the only work of art ever made by a committee.
But what a committee it was: made up some of the finest poets, translators, and scholars in the thoroughly well educated realm of King James I. The Bible that they produced with their collective wisdom and skill, James hoped, would settle dissent on any number of fronts, binding together the dissident branches of the still-new Church of England, calming Puritan disquietude, perhaps even helping bring about a reconciliation of some kind with the Catholic Church. “Money and happiness would dance together through the increasingly elegant streets of London,” writes Nicolson, and “James’s Arcadian vision of untroubled togetherness would descend on the soul of the land like a balm.” No such thing happened, of course; dissent and disunity continued unabated and would soon spill over into civil war. But in the meanwhile, tucked away in their warrens, the makers of James’s Bible produced an elegant and indeed unifying tapestry made of scattered Latin, Hebrew, and Greek texts, debating (in Latin, with learned Greek asides) over such matters as whether Launcelot Andrewes’s “face” was quite the right word in the stirring passage “and darknesse was vpon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God mooued vpon the face of the waters.” Having a broad scene to paint, Nicolson takes his time building up to the work of the great translators and writers under James’s commission, offering a vivid picture of Jacobite London and its many roiling arguments—not least of them concerning the Englishing of biblical words such as ecclesia and presbyteros, on which “the entire meaning of the Reformation hinges.”
Livelier and less scholarly than Alister McGrath’s In the Beginning (2001): an engaging work of literary, cultural, and religious history.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-018516-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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