A lucid, accessible contribution to intellectual history, and a worthy companion to Elaine Pagels’s recent Beyond Belief (p....
A vigorous study of the death and rebirth of empirical thought in the Western tradition.
English classicist Freeman (The Greek Achievement, 1999, etc.) charts two great strains of thought in antiquity. The first, exemplified by the work of Greek thinkers and artists such as Euripides and Aristotle, allowed that some things in the universe may well be unknowable, but that shouldn’t stop humans from asking about them; the second, the province of Christian thinkers such as Jerome and Augustine, held that only God can know the unknowable, and humans have no business nosing around in such matters. The first Freeman dubs “reason,” the second “faith,” and even if the two often blended in the work of thinkers like Plato and Aquinas, they were often opposed to each other. With the ascendancy of Christianity in the Roman world, Freeman observes, “the principles of empirical observation or logic were overruled in the conviction that all knowledge comes from God and even, in the writings of Augustine, that the human mind, burdened with Adam’s original sin, is incapable of thinking for itself.” He notes at least part of the reason for the triumph of unquestioning faith was the inability of early Christian communities to agree on terms by which they could rationally explore the divine; part, however, was purely political: namely, the dawning awareness on the part of Constantine and other emperors that any dissension among the various Christian churches posed a source of jeopardy to their supposedly divinely sanctioned rule. (Thus, in due course, the doctrine of papal infallibility.) The strained competition between faith and reason played out over the centuries, Freeman shows, until by the end of the fourth century “the freedom to explore the nature of God was becoming restricted to the point of extinction,” essentially crushing the Greek tradition until its revival, a millennium later, in the work of St. Thomas Aquinas.
A lucid, accessible contribution to intellectual history, and a worthy companion to Elaine Pagels’s recent Beyond Belief (p. 290).Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2003
ISBN: 1-4000-4085-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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 Yorkerstaff 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
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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