For the benefit of the skeptical would-be faithful (dubbed here “neoagnostics”), journalist Gallagher offers an autobiographical, selectively bicoastal look at liberal religious experience in America today. Gallagher (I.D: How Temperament and Experience Create the Individual, 1996) updates Immanuel Kant’s classic formulation of humanity’s three principal questions (What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope?) to: What is real? What do I feel?, What are my choices? The update reflects the influence of what Gallagher calls millennial religion, by which she means those experiential, nonjudgmental, pluralistic ways of being religious that characterize the spiritual life of some, mostly urban, Americans. (“Millennial” is an unfortunate coinage for this use, since for traditional Christians it implies apocalypse, while for religious non-Christians, who measure time otherwise than from Christ’s birth, it has little currency at all.) Casual and breezy language characterizes much of this self-consciously journalistic romp between such diverse religious centers as Congregation B—nai Jeshurun (a popular synagogue in New York City), the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (also in New York), and the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center (California). Gallagher’s book comprises recountings of worship, meditation, and study experiences she has had at these and like religious institutions, as well as interviews with their respective leaders and flocks. The focus primarily on Judaism, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism reflects the author’s confessed status as a Catholic-bred, meditation-practicing spouse of a Jewish man. The casual style breeds some errors, as in the retelling of the biblical story of the burning bush (which Moses turns toward initially, not away from, as Gallagher narrates), or the medieval Jewish reaction to Maimonides (who in his own lifetime never faced a serious threat of excommunication, as Gallagher implies). But the author has a good ear for the memorable remark, as of the contemplative nun who said of her life, it “is sheer faith most of the time. Very sheer.” An occasionally successful attempt to capture in journalistic prose some varied depths of (post)modern religious experience. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44794-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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