Neither as theologically profound nor as literary as the King James itself, but a useful and entertaining study.
Oxford don and theologian McGrath (Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity, 1995) celebrates the King James Bible.
The English translation commissioned by James I and completed in 1611 is distinguished in two ways, according to McGrath. It’s important to historians and theologians because it put Scripture into the hands of ordinary people. It holds an equally key position in the literary canon as one of the most poetic, haunting works in the English language. The first three chapters summarize the history of the Reformation, the invention and dissemination of the printing press, the status of the European middle class, and the consolidation of the English language. This may be necessary background, but McGrath’s rehashes of well-known information about Gutenberg and Luther are stale and plodding. He serves up fresher material in chapter four, a discussion of the first English Bibles. Introducing readers to the Tyndale Bible, an English version that preceded the King James, McGrath notes reformer William Tyndale’s commitment to rendering the Scriptures in “proper English.” Tyndale’s clear, accessible translation would “prove to be of foundational importance to the shaping of later English translations.” We also read about the Calvinist Geneva Bible before finally getting to the King James Version. McGrath is at his most fascinating when explaining that the King’s translation team did not begin “with blank sheets of paper in front of them”; they were aware (and respectful) of the long line of English translators in which they stood. Bibliophiles will relish the discussion of printing errors in the early editions of the King James, and its defenders will be pleased to learn that none other than Noah Webster praised it for “forming and preserving” America’s English. The book also contains many lovely illustrations and the occasional helpful chart, like “A Note on Paper Sizes,” which explains the differences between a folio and a duodecimo edition.
Neither as theologically profound nor as literary as the King James itself, but a useful and entertaining study.Pub Date: April 10, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-49890-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
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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