A valuable contribution to the evaluation of our knowledge about Jesus by a noted bible scholar. Sanders (Religion/Duke Univ.) returns to the territory of his well-received Jesus and Judaism (not reviewed) to provide an overview of the history of study of the historical Jesus (as opposed to the Christ of faith). He doesn't advance any startling new claims about Jesus; nor does he assume the biographical stance that A.N. Wilson adopted in his Jesus: A Life (1992); but he does offer his own clear summary of what can be accurately said of Jesus of Nazareth. The so-called quest or search for the historical Jesus began in the late 18th century, in the wake of the Enlightenment, and later engaged Albert Schweitzer, among others. At first, scholars thought the real person was easily discoverable behind the mythic accounts of the Gospels. In the 20th century, it became fashionable, Sanders points out, to say that next to nothing could be known about the man. Sanders himself hews to a middle ground: While admitting the difficulties involved in uncovering the historical reality, he nevertheless claims that one can, with reasonable certainty, say quite a lot that is true about Jesus. Sanders presents an outline of Jesus' life and a discussion of his basic beliefs and teachings. He also traces what he discerns as the course of Jesus' ministry and the events leading up to his execution. He places Jesus in both the political setting of the backwater province of the Roman Empire (Judea was then ruled by a fairly independent Herod) and the Judaism of his time. His discussion of the miracles attributed to the man is set against a backdrop of acceptance of magic and miracles generally in the ancient world. Highly readable, this book will be of interest to scholars and accessible to general readers as well. (History Book Club main selection; Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-713-99059-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1994
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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