A splendid account, highly recommended to all readers interested in early American history, women’s studies, or the history...
An elegantly written life of the enigmatic and powerfully charismatic Shaker prophet.
The image most have of the people called Shakers is compounded of an aesthetic appreciation of their elegantly austere furniture, distinctive architecture, and the music of their dancing (as remade by Aaron Copland and others), along with a respect for the integrity of their experiment in communal living, and a puzzlement at the evident attraction of their celibate discipline. It’s a view drawn for the most part from the later-developed Shakerism of the 19th century, organized in small communities from Maine to Indiana. But the Shakerism that came to America in the days of the Revolution was quite a different thing, largely the creation of a blacksmith’s daughter named Ann Lee. Her remarkable achievement was to transform the enthusiastic Quakerism she had adopted in preindustrial Manchester into a strange and compelling vision of God’s new dispensation—a new Christianity—with herself joining Jesus at its center as a mediator of grace. Novelist Francis (Taking Apart the Poco Poco, 1995) provides a full (the first full biography ever written, in fact), faithful, and immensely enjoyable account of the vicissitudes of Mother Ann and her disciples as they take the Shaker gospel from upstate New York to New England, meeting resistance and escalating violence along the way. The religious landscape of backwoods New England—a roiling mix of orthodox Calvinists, Baptists, Seekers, Perfectionists, New Light revivalists, and others—is vividly rendered, as is the unique personality of Mother Ann herself. The wife of a blacksmith, Ann lost all four of her children in infancy. Putting her Shakers in the place of her lost children, and Jesus in her estranged husband’s stead, she created a remythologized Christianity that found a feminine dimension in the Godhead itself and replaced sexual ecstasy with dervish-like ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues. Francis is sensitive to the psychosocial dynamics of Shaker leaders and followers alike, as well as to the small tragedies of broken lives and broken families that created both converts and violent enemies of the Shaker faith.
A splendid account, highly recommended to all readers interested in early American history, women’s studies, or the history of religion.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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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