A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith.
A famed religious scholar’s poignant life story.
Pagels (Religion/Princeton Univ.; Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, 2012, etc.), who is especially renowned for her work studying the ancient Gnostic brand of Christianity, provides a raw and often moving autobiography. The author begins in the postwar suburbs of Palo Alto, California, where she was raised by emotionally detached, and certainly nonspiritual, parents. A visit to a Billy Graham crusade awakened the young Pagels to the world of religion. “It changed my life, as the preacher promised it would,” she notes, referring to Graham, “although not entirely as he intended, or at least, not for as long.” By the time she was a student at Stanford, she had lost her basic faith in Christianity but remained intrigued by religion as a whole. She went on to earn a doctorate at Harvard, where she first encountered the newly discovered writings of the Gnostics, a sect that had been branded as heretical and was extinguished early in the history of Christianity. The author’s academic pursuits unfold alongside a touching personal life story. After marrying physicist Heinz Pagels, the couple went on to have a son, who was eventually diagnosed with a fatal heart condition that took his life while he was still in kindergarten. As she was recovering from this tragedy, her husband fell while hiking and was killed. Much of the rest of the author’s story involves her attempts to remain sane and stable while raising two other adopted children and continuing her career at Princeton. In the process, she went back to Scriptures and early Christian writings, not due to faith but as a way of understanding how others dealt with tragedy in the past. Pagels is a controversial figure in Christianity, heralded by many scholars and modernists yet derided by traditionalists, and her approach to God—amorphous and skeptical—will either offend or resonate with particular readers. The story of her grief, however, will touch all.
A meaningful tale of pain and hope on the edges of faith.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-236853-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
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