Authoritative, accessible study of Osborn’s rare early work by an expert scholar of her writing and time.
A rigorous examination of the unsettling life and writing of a deeply pious woman in mid-18th-century America.
In looking closely at the life of this colonial evangelical woman and rare published author, Brekus (American Religious History/Univ. of Chicago; The Religious History of American Women, 2007, etc.) presents an illuminating window into early American religious sects and how deeply engrained they were in the everyday lives of all people. Osborn, born in 1714 to strict Congregationalist parents who settled in Newport, R.I., was one of the first women who published in America and was allowed to teach her Christian experience—a loaded Enlightenment word meaning what she came to know strictly firsthand. Having defied her parents at age 17 to run off with a sailor, widowed soon after with a baby and returning as the prodigal to her hometown, Osborn nearly joined the Anglicans before her mother guilt tripped her into returning to the fold. Then she had a born-again experience and resolved to write about it for the benefit of others. A deeply personal relationship with God and an urge to spread the gospel characterized the so-called revivalists emerging from the more strict reformist faiths that had seen the early founding of America. The evangelicals that Osborn gravitated toward at Rev. Nathaniel Clap’s First Church in Newport believed strongly in good works, human goodness and free will, although they were also extremely self-abasing. Her memoir was published, with the implicit approval of male church elders, as a way of preaching the Gospel, leading to popular prayer meetings at her home that included slaves. Brekus’ thorough work reveals by degrees how Osborn’s excruciatingly heartfelt faith was also responding to cataclysmic changes taking place in colonial life, ushering in what we now call capitalism, individualism and humanitarianism.
Authoritative, accessible study of Osborn’s rare early work by an expert scholar of her writing and time.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18290-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
PERSPECTIVES
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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