Scholarly readers who thought Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007) went too far will appreciate this temperate and thoughtfully...
A literary rally to restore sanity in religion.
From the Crusades to the terrorist attacks of recent decades, the stories of religious beliefs gone awry that populate the history books are proof enough to “new atheist” authors like Christopher Hitchens that religion is the root of all evil. Egginton (The Theater of Truth, 2010, etc.), on the other hand, argues that fundamentalism, not religion, is to blame for acts of violence and political unrest, putting atheists and religious zealots on the opposite sides of the same extreme coin. The author deftly weaves history's greatest dialogues, like Plato's "Allegory of the Cave," with examples from contemporary popular culture, like Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, to show how fundamentalism is a threat to world peace. He argues that once people accept that there is a "code of codes," or an underlying truth that negates opposing beliefs, they lose the heart of science, politics and even religion, which is skepticism. Digging deeper, Egginton cites the works of Christian philosophers like St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine to suggest that scientific method and faith are not mutually exclusive. Citing statistics that prove just how many modern-day Christians believe in the Second Coming of Christ without condemning other religions and the vast numbers of Muslims who read the Koran without resorting to violence, the author brings to light a very different America than the one seen on television. He calls on saints and scientists alike to fight dogma—whether religious or scientific—with reason.
Scholarly readers who thought Hitchens’ God Is Not Great (2007) went too far will appreciate this temperate and thoughtfully researched look at religion.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-231-14878-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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