by Bruce Glass ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2011
A fine introduction to evolutionary science that leaves room for religion.
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Deploring both the atheistic and “intelligent-design” camps that have polarized recent debates over Darwin, this smart, well-informed but conflicted treatise insists that Christianity and evolution are entirely compatible.
Centering the author’s treatment of this contentious subject is a lucid, engaging defense of evolution against creationist obfuscations. Glass delivers a superb exposition of Darwinian theory and a meticulous, sharply reasoned discussion of the evidence—fossils, DNA analysis, vestigial or oddly engineered organs that suggest descent from distant species, direct observations of evolutionary change—that supports it. He supplements his discussion with a brief, engrossing history of life, taking readers from the earliest microbes through the emergence of the major categories of flora and fauna—birds, he contends, are essentially flying dinosaurs—to a detailed account of the evolution of man. Glass is uncompromising and persuasive in his dismissal of “creation science,” but his efforts to conjoin evolution to robust Christian faith are less compelling. Rejecting literalist readings of the Bible, he argues that the fundamentalist view of a God who instigates every event, or of a “God of the gaps” who lurks in every natural phenomenon that science can’t yet explain, misunderstands a supernatural God who stands outside time and space but can choose to work through physical laws and random happenstance. Steeped in Aquinas and St. Augustine, Glass is no mealymouthed agnostic—he believes in an unerringly good, omniscient God and serves up involved discussions of Christ’s divinity and the Trinitarian mystery. However, his full-blooded Christianity sits a bit awkwardly beside his scientific rationalism. His logic is impeccable when he insists that evolutionary theory does not rule out the existence of God, but he offers no positive evidence for a deity. (That, he contends, would be the error of looking to nature for proof of a God who transcends it.) Glass makes a stronger case for evolution than for Christianity, but readers of all persuasions will find his attempt to reconcile the two illuminating.
A fine introduction to evolutionary science that leaves room for religion.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-578-11047-9
Page Count: 212
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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 Yorker staff 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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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