Scripture and science meet in a pop-archaeological text; Scripture prevails.
The story of the author’s claim to have found long-lost Sodom, the world’s most wicked city.
Following the path of Abraham, Lot and Lot’s unfortunate wife, as directed primarily by Genesis, Collins (Dean of the College of Archaeology and Biblical History/Trinity Southwest Univ.; The Defendable Faith: Lessons in Christian Apologetics, 2008, etc.) places the ancient, prototypical sin city on the eastern side of the geographic flatland surrounding the Jordan River before it feeds into the Dead Sea. As those who have read the Bible know, the Sodomites, evil in charitable and financial matters as well as more lewd practices, were obliterated by a celestial catastrophe. Writing with the assistance of co-author Scott (Latter-Day Cipher, 2009, etc.), biblical archaeology maven Collins fixes the event in the Middle Bronze Age at a site in today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan called Tall el-Hammam, where he and his crew have been digging for years. There, well north of the spot unfortunate Sodom has been located by others, they discovered the foundation walls of a considerable city and some peculiar artifacts. Moreover, there appears to have been no evidence of life for an intervening 700 years. There was not much else, but it was enough to convince Collins that a cosmic event was visited there four millennia ago, just where awestruck Abraham could have seen it. If only on the strength of Collins’ personal conviction that he’s found the right place with the right date, architecture and artifacts, many readers may be convinced, too. Others may want to wait for more. Collins punctuates the impassioned narrative with overly novelistic “backstories” mostly depicting “Dr. C.” (an appellation he seems to enjoy) in a kind of Indiana Jones mode.
Scripture and science meet in a pop-archaeological text; Scripture prevails.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451684308
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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