A labor of love, but hagiography nonetheless. (4 maps; 14 color illustrations)
An admiring biography of the medieval Italian saint.
House (The Great Safari, 1993) declares at the outset that he is no scholar, but he did live for six months in Assisi and has visited many of the world’s important Franciscan sites. He begins with Francis’s death in 1226, introducing two notions he examines later—Francis’s uncanny capacity for relating to animals, especially birds (when he died, it was said that singing larks circled above him), and the appearance on his body of the stigmata (the five wounds of Christ). House then returns to conventional chronology. And so we hear about Francis’s childhood in the household of a prosperous cloth merchant, about his somewhat dissipated youth (including full measures of wine, women, and song), his year in captivity during regional warfare, his increasing sensitivity to the needs of the poor, and his decision to renounce all worldliness and devote himself to a life of self-denial and religious purity that was astonishing in its rigor. House chronicles the slow, steady growth of his following, his visit in 1209 to the Pope, who granted him permission to establish his own order (the Friars Minor, or Franciscans), which has grown to become one of the most influential in the Church. Here, too, are the stories of his principal followers, most significantly his Clare, the young woman who established the Poor Clares, the second order of the Franciscans, who today number some 18,000 women. The author follows Francis to the Holy Land, where he failed to convert the Sultan to Christianity but earned his admiration nonetheless. Throughout, he offers some half-hearted (and sometimes half-baked) scientific and psychological explanations for some of the miraculous aspects of Francis’s story, but invariably he concludes that the supernatural is actual. “[A] sweeping dismissal of such occurrences [miracles],” he declares, “is as irrational as their wholesale acceptance.”
A labor of love, but hagiography nonetheless. (4 maps; 14 color illustrations)Pub Date: March 23, 2001
ISBN: 1-58768-009-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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.
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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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