Gardner (The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, 1983, etc.), world-class debunker of paranormal phenomena, now turns his demolition skills on the woman who founded one of America's most successful home-grown religions. The title is bitingly ironic, for Gardner considers Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science to be neither healing nor revelatory but, rather, a farrago of wild imaginings. According to Gardner, Eddy (1821-1910) suffered from ``delusions of grandeur'' and ``delusions of persecution,'' and wrote her books by plagiarizing other writers. In fact, he declares, Christian Science's central precept- -that Divine Mind is the sole reality, and illness and death illusions—was lifted by Eddy from the teachings of a ``quack'' named Phineas Parkhurst, who cured her of a spinal ailment. Eddy always denied her connection to Parkhurst, claiming that her doctrines came as a direct transmission from God; to Gardner, this is yet more evidence of her ``outrageous lying.'' He makes a strong case, demonstrating Eddy's plagiarism in damning fashion by placing her writings side-by-side with her apparent sources, and detailing her relentless persecution of heretics, her nervous disorders (including lifelong morphine addiction), and her extraordinary fears (she believed enemies were killing her through ``malicious animal magnetism''). Most welcome from the standpoint of literary history is the author's favorable reassessment of Mark Twain's forgotten booklength battering of Eddy, Christian Science (1907). More inquisition than objective report, but on target: a well- aimed tomato to the face. (Photographs—not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1993
ISBN: 0-87975-838-4
Page Count: 250
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1993
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
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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