Passionate but deeply flawed.
An enthusiastic exploration of the nature of the Christian God and of Christianity itself.
Brother Bob’s manuscript splits along two parallel but only slightly connected themes: on the one hand, it explores the nature and majesty of God as revealed in the Bible; on the other hand, it lays out a case for the truth of Christianity in the face of the world’s other popular religions as well as modern science. The author pursues the first theme with gusto, remarking on the seeming contradictions of God’s triune nature and attempting to clarify how he could exist as a “plural being.” Deriving his explanations from the Old Testament and the New Testament, Brother Bob says that the truth of the Trinity is self-evident; Judaism, readers are told, rejects the concept by missing “the clear evidence right before their eyes.” This strand of the book also contains brisk exhortations for his Christian readers to live better lives. Brother Bob’s conviction is no less strong when he ventures into comparative religion, although his grasp on the facts begins to falter. “Hinduism and Buddhism were books written by mere men,” he writes, seeing “no declaration of their message being divinely originated.” However, both Hinduism and Buddhism do indeed claim divine origins for their belief systems. “No other spiritual system has its God die,” he writes at another point, although the first-century world into which Christianity was born featured many other dying and resurrected gods. Even this shaky grasp of facts deserts the narrative when Brother Bob switches to the second theme and begins a long diatribe against scientific fact as well as basic morality, as when he approves of death by stoning—including the stoning of children—as laid out in the Old Testament as a means to maintain “society’s structured values.” When he adopts the talking points of young-Earth creationism—the universe is at most 8,700 years old; “Why, if man evolved from monkeys, do we still have monkeys?”—all but his most committed readers will likely find something else to do.
Passionate but deeply flawed.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Oct. 29, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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