An interesting read overall, but falls short of its potential.
Examining Jesus’ moral influence on Western culture.
Famed biblical scholar Ehrman proposes as his thesis: “The impulse to help strangers in need is embedded in our Western moral conscience because of the teachings of Jesus.” He presents the moral teachings of Jesus as a universalization of his inherited Jewish ethics, and as a revolutionary change from previous Western practice. Ehrman begins by focusing on the concept of altruism, which he defines generally as “actions that benefit someone other than oneself.” Altruism, he notes, is an elusive concept, yet also a defining idea in Christian morality that has shaped Western culture, leading to everything from hospitals to philanthropy to the modern welfare state. Altruism, however, was not always considered an important virtue. Looking back to a variety of ancient philosophers, Ehrman uses concrete examples to show that ancient morality favored the powerful, favored family and community, and favored the individual’s quest for eudaimonia, the good life. Jewish morality, the author notes, stood apart from Greek and Roman morality in important ways, namely through its focus on God as a loving being who desires his believers to also love one another and perform acts of kindness and charity. Jesus, Ehrman argues, took this moral basis and expanded it. “Love,” he notes, “stands at the very center of Jesus’s ethical instruction.” Jesus taught a radical altruism, including love for strangers and outsiders. This focus, Ehrman stresses, shaped Christian thought (albeit imperfectly) and went on to change Western civilization. Ehrman’s explanation provides the lay reader with meaningful background about the ethics of the ancient world. However, his argument does not seem particularly groundbreaking. The reader is also left wanting further historical examination as to how Jesus’ teachings spread into culture in the first few centuries of Christianity.
An interesting read overall, but falls short of its potential.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9781668025031
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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