A knowledgeable appraisal of an overlooked but important figure in our colonial history.
A specialist in Puritan New England submits a biography of the clergyman who founded New Haven.
Through the singular life of the Coventry-born, Oxford-educated John Davenport (1597–1670), Bremer (History Emeritus/Millersville Univ.; John Winthrop: America’s Forgotten Founding Father, 2003, etc.) supplies general readers with a solid primer about the much-misunderstood Puritans and the religious issues that preoccupied this reform movement within the Church of England during the 17th century. By 1625, Davenport’s reputation for learning, industry, devotion and brilliant preaching made him an important London voice for Protestant unity. But demands from the crown and the bishops to conform to church practice increasingly conflicted with parishioners’ calls for purification, for removing all vestiges of Catholicism from their religious practice. Davenport wrestled with doctrinal questions that will strike many modern readers as absurd, but for him, they were deadly serious matters of conscience, where a deviation from God’s will amounted to sin. Driven to emigrate, seeking a place to enjoy the liberty of all God’s ordinances, “all in purity,” Davenport founded the New Haven colony, modeling its physical layout on Solomon’s Temple, establishing civil and church institutions designed to promote godliness. By 1667, alarmed by religious divisions that parted the colony from its founding principles, Davenport accepted a call to Boston’s First Church. Even while the minister’s private life remains tantalizingly remote (did he, indeed, suffer from venereal disease?), Bremer nicely situates Davenport’s story within the larger English world of the Protectorate and Restoration, among his better-known colonial contemporaries like John Winthrop, Anne Hutchinson and John Cotton, and around enduring theological controversies that Davenport, despite his tireless appeals for moderation, never quite escaped.
A knowledgeable appraisal of an overlooked but important figure in our colonial history.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-17913-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2012
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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