This “big tent” version of Christianity proceeds from a generosity of spirit rather than didactic argument.
An insightful illumination of the life and significance of its subject, but this is more of a compact summary than a spark for fresh discussion.
As a prolific poet, novelist and English professor, Parini (The Passages of H.M., 2010, etc.) doesn’t have much of a theological ax to grind, though neither fundamentalists nor atheists are likely to find themselves in accord with his stated attempt to find “balance between the literal and the figurative, giving full weight to the concrete meaning while relishing the mythic contours of the story.” This volume launches the publisher’s Icons series and might best be classified as interpretive biography, aimed at the lay reader rather than the scholar, yet summarizing the scholarship and shifting currents of thought that have led to such diverse and divergent beliefs on who Jesus was and what he meant. The context within which the author places him suggests that he was a literate man, a devout but reform-minded Jew, well-aware of the spirit that shaped Buddhism and the teachings and work of other prophets, at a time when miracles were more commonly accepted. “Jesus never meant to found a formal church with rituals and organized practices, to ordain priests, or to issue doctrinaire statements that formed a rigid program for salvation,” writes Parini. “Other than ‘follow me,’ his only commandment was ‘to love one another as I have loved you.’ ” He also “had little interest in damning anyone, and he certainly had no concept of hell as a place for perpetual torment.” Yet the author does not discredit the possibilities of miracles or resurrection, the divinity that makes Jesus more than a radical teacher. Those who believe that the essence of Jesus’ message involves “a change of heart” and “a shift into a larger consciousness, a life-enhancing awareness of the mind of God” will find a view of Christianity that embraces the mystery.
This “big tent” version of Christianity proceeds from a generosity of spirit rather than didactic argument.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02589-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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