The point being, as Armstrong writes, that tolerance is a sine qua non in a world in which so many people “prefer being...
Prolific religious-studies scholar Armstrong (The Spiral Staircase, 2004, etc.) offers a lively, big-picture treatise in comparative religions, finding similarities more than differences.
Borrowing from the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and with ecumenical good cheer, Armstrong evokes an Axial Age that lasted for about 700 years, from roughly 900 to 200 b.c. During that time came great faiths that “have continued to nourish humanity”: Hinduism and Buddhism from India; Daoism and Confucianism from China; rationalism from Greece; and monotheism from what is now the vicinity of Israel. Armstrong allows that there’s quite a lot of scholarly guesswork attendant in looking into the prehistory of these faiths; in recent years, for instance, it has been determined—for the time being, anyway—that Zoroaster lived centuries before the usually presumed sixth century and that Laozi (Lao Tse), the Daoist philosopher, lived centuries later. Still, there is enough good data to show that each of these worldviews, sometimes independent of each other, sometimes by word of mouth, addressed similar concerns in quite similar ways: Each recognized that suffering is “an inescapable fact of human life,” indeed part of its definition; and each developed a body of doctrine or learned opinion about such core ethical principles as hospitality, empathy and “concern for everybody.” Of course, these big ideas come wrapped in very different packages; though informed by “the Deuteronomists’ passionate insistence on the importance of justice, equity, and compassion,” the ancient Israelites took their instructions from the “one true god,” whereas the Greeks advanced the same sorts of ideas through a panoply of gods and the Buddhists through no god at all.
The point being, as Armstrong writes, that tolerance is a sine qua non in a world in which so many people “prefer being right to being compassionate.” A useful text for an intolerant and uncompassionate time.Pub Date: April 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41317-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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