A biblical travelogue—and far funnier than your standard King James.
Esquire editor-at-large Jacobs, who read the entire 2002 Encyclopedia Britannica for The Know-It-All (2004), embarks on his second lofty exploit: a year of living the Bible “as literally as possible.”
Like David confronting Goliath, Jacobs stood before his ex-girlfriend’s Bible and pledged to spend the following 12 months (much of that time in New York City) exploring biblical literalism by living the good book as it was originally intended. The author attempted to follow many infamous biblical dictums—growing a beard (he does), eschewing menstruating women (he tries), accepting Creationism, keeping the Sabbath, praying three times a day, dancing before the Lord (and thus attending “the loudest, rowdiest, most drunken party of my life…with several hundred Hasidic men”), stoning blasphemers (a futile pebble toss at a pot-bellied, Sabbath-breaking Avis employee)—and learned in the process that living the Bible literally is baffling and often impossible. Rules like destroying idols and killing magicians, for example, are federally outlawed. Jacobs paid attention to both the Old and New Testaments, and received help from a board of spiritual advisors, “some conservative, some one four-letter word away from excommunication.” His efforts at this daunting task are impressive and often tremendously amusing—though rarely deep or scholarly. The author’s determination despite constant complications from his modern secular life (wife, job, family, NYC) underscores both the absurdity of his plight and its profundity. While debunking biblical literalism—with dinner party–ready scriptural quotes—Jacobs simultaneously finds his spirituality renewed. He discovers that “you can’t immerse yourself in religion for 12 months and emerge unaffected...I didn’t expect to fondle a pigeon egg…or find solace in prayer.”
A biblical travelogue—and far funnier than your standard King James.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9147-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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