An engaging, enlightening study of the historical effects of one galvanizing personality.
A substantial new look at the life of Martin Luther (1483-1546), published to coincide with the 500-year anniversary of his revolutionary theses.
Refreshingly, Roper (Modern History/Univ. of Oxford; Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, 2004, etc.) does not take for granted any of the received wisdom from previous scholars regarding the life of this fearless, self-styled prophet. There are numerous biographies of Luther, a fact the author acknowledges in the introduction, but she finds that the long closure of Eastern Germany to scholarship has skewed the interpretation of Lutheranism by emphasizing the Reformation activity in the cities of the south rather than in Luther’s “home social and cultural context,” namely Wittenberg and environs, in Saxony-Anhalt. For example, Roper shows how Luther’s vision narrowed after his release from the Castle of Wartburg, and he attempted to reign in the speeding reforms he put into play while the genie of his revolutionary ideas, so to speak, was out of the bottle. The author examines his close influences and friendships, neglected elsewhere, such as with Andreas Karlstadt (and with many others he fell out with), and his artistic collaboration with Lucas Cranach the Elder, an official painter of Wittenberg who essentially molded the reformer’s public image in his published works. Roper emphasizes how novel, even feminist, his ideas were about marriage and sex, as he had to act as essentially a matchmaker for the nuns who were leaving the convents in response to Reformation ideas. These included the mature, strong-willed Katharina von Bora, who became Luther’s wife and the mother of their children. Roper also shows how uncompromising Luther could be—e.g., in rejecting the humanism of Erasmus; excoriating the peasants who rose up for better treatment during the War of the Peasants of 1524-25; and espousing vehement anti-Semitism.
An engaging, enlightening study of the historical effects of one galvanizing personality.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9619-7
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
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
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