While full of jargon, this work about the Bible offers a wealth of textual pearls.
A book-length doctoral dissertation focuses on finding hidden meaning in the Old Testament.
This extensive work from debut author Kohav revolves around a fairly straightforward idea: Is there a secret in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible)? This secret (or “Sôd,” as it is referred to in the text) is not something that comes from a lost chapter or has been concealed by a grand conspiracy. The Sôd is, instead, something that has been hidden in plain sight. One merely needs to know how to unearth the correct interpretation. But, as this is an academic work, the path to that assessment is a long, winding, and verbose one. Before any conclusions can be drawn, readers are taken on a tour of such heady topics as “accessibility to esoteric knowledge,” mysticism, and the “meaning of meaning.” As the author’s main considerations come into focus, there is a great emphasis on certain biblical occurrences. Take the book of Joshua. What is meant by the bizarre conquering of Jericho? Are readers of such a fantastical narrative really meant to believe that a city fell to an invading army because of a seemingly magical occurrence? Or is the tale meant to drive at something else entirely? Consider the story of Jacob. What importance does Jacob’s twin brother, Esau, play? The hypothesis steers readers beyond simplistic allegorical ideas into concepts like chakras and what it means to be a “would-be initiate of” God. And that is merely the beginning of the concepts to unpack. For the nonacademic, this untangling is no easy task. Phrases such as “narrative-conceptual integrity” and “the critical role of falsifiability” make the work, at least in places, a struggle to fully understand. The inclusion of ideas from more approachable thinkers like Umberto Eco and Jacques Derrida provides some elucidation. But, as one might expect from a doctoral dissertation, the layperson is not the intended audience. Nevertheless, the armchair professor can still glean much from these pages. The books of the Bible, for all their familiarity, are still open to close and even novel analysis. All readers can come away with fresh perspectives on episodes and themes that they may have taken for granted. A potent point comes with a comparison of the Odyssey and the story of the Exodus. Whereas the Odyssey follows the type of hero’s journey arc very much in tune with the modern concept of storytelling (the protagonist embarks on a quest and returns changed), the Exodus is different. As the author puts it: “The Odyssey’s symbol of initiation…is a circle; the Exodus’s, an arrow.” Dissecting the implications of such a point requires a great number of words and notes. But for committed readers, they are bountiful in food for thought. Even if every argument cannot be distinctly grasped by the uninitiated, the volume provides a new way of looking at very old stories.
While full of jargon, this work about the Bible offers a wealth of textual pearls.Pub Date: May 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-79937-7
Page Count: 530
Publisher: MaKoM Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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