A well-crafted outing for fans of early modern English history or of fiction rooted in scholarly detection and religious...
A tale of doctrinal squabble in the ax-happy England of Henry VIII, from which emerges this important life lesson: never piss off a saint.
He wasn’t a saint then, but Thomas More, author of Utopia and sympathetic hero of A Man for All Seasons, had plenty going for him in his day. He was among the richest and most powerful civil servants in 16th-century England, and for a time he had leave from his king to do pretty much whatever he wanted. One of his favorite hobbies was slaughtering Protestants, writes former London Sunday Times correspondent Moynahan; More “reveled in burnings” and was pleased to put his enemies to “ye fyre ever lastynge.” He conceived a special hatred for a minor cleric named William Tyndale, a gifted linguist and prose stylist. Arguing that English “doth correspond with scripture than ever Latin may,” Tyndale worked for years on a vernacular Bible, which put him at odds with the clerical establishment on a number of counts. The priests considered the Bible and its interpretation their exclusive province; the laity had no business opening its pages or pondering alternative readings, and when they did (as when one unfortunate tailor suggested that Christ didn’t offer his literal body at the Last Supper), they were tortured, burned, or drawn and quartered. Tyndale escaped this dispiriting climate and earned More’s renewed hatred by relocating to Germany and the Low Countries, centers of the Lutheran heresy. The author charges that More arranged for Tyndale’s arrest and subsequent martyrdom in Belgium just before being arrested and executed himself in 1635, having crossed King Henry one time too many. But Tyndale’s legacy endures, Moynahan notes, for the King James Bible incorporates much of his English, including some of its most beautiful passages.
A well-crafted outing for fans of early modern English history or of fiction rooted in scholarly detection and religious intrigue (e.g., The Name of the Rose and the Caedfael mysteries).Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-31486-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
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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