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 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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