An impressive, powerful intellectual history.
A riveting dual biography reveals the social, political, and religious tensions roiling 16th-century Europe.
Massing (Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq, 2004, etc.), a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, focuses on the well-known rivalry between the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1467-1536) and the German reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) to create a majestic, deeply informed portrait of their tempestuous times. Both men were revolutionaries, rebelling against the ethical and theological assumptions of the medieval world and the hierarchical, dissolute Catholic Church; each sought an authentic spiritual path to enlightenment and salvation. For Erasmus, performing “works of an ethical nature” was central to being “a pious Christian.” For Luther, good works were “not just useless but dangerous—a self-seeking expression that imparted a false sense of security.” Although both became monks, Erasmus was cosmopolitan and gregarious; Luther, provincial, harsh, and viciously anti-Semitic. Erasmus appealed “to reason, free will, and moral virtue”; Luther thundered that faith alone led to redemption. In their prolific writings, which gained wide readership from the burgeoning printing industry, they railed against rampant “papal, curial, and ecclesiastical excesses.” Both offered their own translations of the Bible, accessible to common readers, an affront to clerical authority that incited the church’s wrath. Luther went farther than Erasmus by condemning the church for collecting fees for performing rites, insisting on celibacy among the clergy, and selling indulgences. Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, made public in 1517 as the 95 theses, catapulted Luther to sudden fame—and also led to virulent attacks that dogged his life: his books were burned, and he was summoned to recant before judges at Worms. His “unflinching stand,” Thomas Carlyle later wrote, “was the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men,” setting the stage for English Puritanism, parliamentary government, the French Revolution, and modernity. Massing argues persuasively that the discordant views represented by the two men continue to shape Western culture.
An impressive, powerful intellectual history.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-051760-1
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 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
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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