A prolific classical historian attempts to uncover the ``historical'' Peter from evidence in the New Testament. For Grant (Constantine the Great, p. 681, etc.), St. Peter is ``one of the most significant people who ever lived,'' a man who held together the original Christian community and made possible the work of Paul and the spread of Christianity throughout the world. In order to produce a strictly historical account of Peter, Grant rejects as unreliable whatever he considers to be a religious or typological metaphor in the New Testament. Furthermore, he harks back to 1920s German biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann with a blanket, a priori assumption that miraculous and supernatural events did not really happen, although their moral or pietistic ``meaning'' is true. Thus, the story of Peter walking on the water toward Jesus is merely a pre-scientific way of stating that one should focus on Jesus amidst life's uncertainties. This reductionist approach leads to a text that is a patchwork of probabilities, with the author rather unscientifically begging his own questions and determining what is the ``more likely'' course of events. In Grant's scenario, Peter emerges as a fairly well-off fish pickler, impulsive but slow in understanding, whose faith led Jesus to appoint him first among the apostles and foundation stone of the new movement. Grant accepts as likely the tradition that Peter was crucified and buried in Rome, although he brings in little evidence from recent Vatican excavations. Occasionally, he drops his pose of scholarly detachment, as when he explains that the apostles left everything to follow Jesus because they were too lazy to work, or when he dismisses the resurrection of Christ as a highly motivating delusion. Copious footnotes and a bibliography provide useful tools for further study. A mostly derivative work in which the author's insights are limited by a naive positivism. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; History Book Club main selection)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-19354-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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