A quick, efficient job of fairly sketching this extraordinary life.
An admiring defense of the new pope, who is not afraid to shake things up.
A British journalist and co-founder of the worldwide media project Catholic Voices, Ivereigh brushes aside any “false idea” that the former Argentine Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (b. 1936) ever held conservative views and takes great pains to show he has been a lifelong reformer. When he was ordained a priest in 1969 at the age of 32, Bergoglio was deeply influenced by the reforms instigated by the Second Vatican Council. Moreover, as a young priest, Bergoglio fused important relationships with formative political currents of the day, such as Marxism and Peronism—e.g., he gave “spiritual support” at Salvador University in Buenos Aires to leaders of the Guardia de Hierro (“Iron Guard”), which advocated for the original worker-based Peronist platform. Ivereigh insists that Bergoglio’s sympathy for the “popular values of the pueblo fiel did not make him a party activist.” During the so-called Dirty War in Argentina of the late 1970s, many close to the priest were “disappeared,” and the author asserts that Bergoglio actively worked to protect the victims and fellow Jesuits, contrary to the barbs launched by Horacio Verbitsky in his book El Silencio. Yet Ivereigh also notes Bergoglio’s ability to “play his cards very close to his chest.” Always eager to put forth a pastoral rather than ideological approach, Bergoglio is a deeply intuitive and well-read teacher, constantly warning against “worldliness” and increasingly attuned to charismatic spirituality. The author maintains that Bergoglio is a master of forging consensus—e.g., in the wrangling over the Argentinian same-sex legislation of 2010; he officially denounced it but left open a possibility of “revising and extending the concept of civil unions.” Elected to the papacy in February 2013, Francis promises to continue forging his particular brand of humility and resoluteness.
A quick, efficient job of fairly sketching this extraordinary life.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1627791571
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
PROFILES
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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