Straightforward, bold, easy reading. The author’s careful survey serves as a useful corrective to Dan Brown’s fiction, which...
Episcopal priest and prolific author Chilton (Rabbi Paul, 2004, etc.) argues that Mary Magdalene influenced early Christianity—but not by sleeping with Jesus.
When they hear the name Mary Magdalene, most people imagine a prostitute or, if they’ve read The Da Vinci Code, a secret lover of Jesus. Here, Chilton (Religion/Bard College) sets the record straight. The New Testament, he reminds us, tells us that Magdalene was possessed by seven demons, and Jesus healed her. The Gospels also depict her as the first person to get the news that he had been raised from the dead. Chilton further argues that Magdalene was the nameless woman who anointed Jesus just before his arrest and crucifixion. In his account, her early shaping of Christianity (in particular, its understandings of healing) was as crucial as that of Peter and other personal followers of Jesus. Because of its deep ambivalence toward women, the church—from its earliest days through the medieval period to the present—either ignored Magdalene or reduced her to a licentious vixen. No one knows when people started passing around the story that she was Jesus’ concubine, though heretics were punished for holding that view in the early-13th century. Chilton contrasts medieval church leaders, who were uncomfortable with the idea of a powerful woman shaping the faith, with Jesus himself, who embraced “the full feminine force of divinity.” The author not only examines orthodox Christianity’s treatment of Magdalene, he also looks at the Gnostics, some of whom held sacred a Gospel ascribed to her. But that legacy is ambiguous: The Gnostics’ Magdalene is both wise and hysterical, strong and submissive.
Straightforward, bold, easy reading. The author’s careful survey serves as a useful corrective to Dan Brown’s fiction, which seems to be taken as truth by an alarming number of people.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-51317-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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