A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the...
George Washington: soldier, patriot, president—saint? This book parses the founding father’s achievements through the lens of Christian theology, making some surprising observations along the way.
Blending the mythical and the historical to convey the holiness of its subject, this book is neither strictly a history nor a biography. Connell (The Secrets of Mary, 2010, etc.) details apocrypha unaddressed in the work of mainstream biographers: Washington’s seemingly mystical imperviousness to musket fire, his supernatural vision at Valley Forge and, Connell argues, his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Like most hagiographers, Connell begins with a committed belief that her subject is uniquely touched by God, and the book is largely a rhetorical exercise in proving the truth of that assumption. This becomes uncomfortable since, of course, Washington is not a saint recognized by the Catholic Church; many scholars agree he was not Catholic, either, though he was, in fact, a Mason—a significant aspect of his spirituality that goes unmentioned here. The worshipful tone of Connell’s prose—“history has canonized” Washington, she says, describing him as a “mystical icon of heroic grace”—may rankle secular readers as well as the true faithful, who might justifiably wonder if either the author or the subject can claim legitimacy to such assertions. Although Connell never actually classifies Washington as a saint or argues outright for his beatification, and she never describes his exploits as miracles, her point is nevertheless clear and in concert with Catholic theology: God, or “Kind Providence” (Washington’s preferred term), actively worked through the great leader and chose him to found the new nation by God’s grace. This conviction leads Connell to some observations about American political philosophy that will delight some readers and provoke others, not least of which is the assertion that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are rooted in the Bible. But in the end, all serious scholars agree that Washington was, indeed, a devout Christian, and the primary source material Connell has gathered here—including little-examined oral histories that deal with his spirituality—make her book a valuable addition to existing scholarship.
A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the patriotic.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489589668
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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