In a secular age, here's an attempt to respiritualize the calendar with a year's worth of essays—some reprinted from Christianity Today and Modern Liturgy—covering every major Christian feast. The Chrysostom Society, whose members authored this collection, is a loose affiliation of Christian writers who assemble once a year to discuss their work. A few big names jump out—Madeleine L'Engle, Walter Wangerin, Jr., Gregory Wolfe, Larry Woiwode—but the rest are lesser lights. The title notwithstanding, only a handful of the pieces here are fiction—most notably L'Engle's quirky tale (``Transfiguration'') of a man, a thief, and a merry Christmas—with the bulk being memoirs of happy childhood or struggling adulthood. Five authors chip in twice: Wangerin, who longs to be pregnant like Mary (``Annunciation'') and recalls his boyhood desire to see Jesus (``Maundy Thursday''); Emilie Griffin, who exposes the religious roots of Mardi Gras in ``Shrove Tuesday'' and pays homage to the ``Solemnity of Mary''; William Griffin, who lauds ``All Saints'' and compares Herod's slaughter of first-born males (``Holy Innocents'') to modern-day abortion; Robert Siegel, with poems marking ``Ash Wednesday'' and ``Palm Sunday''; and Virginia Stem Owens, who commemorates Christ's Passion in ``Passion Sunday'' and ``Good Friday'' (``the day you can do nothing''). Among the best of the rest, Alice Slaiku Lawhead struggles to remember God in the midst of ``Advent''; editor Peterson (Spiritual Theology/Regents College) recalls the ``Christmas'' that his parents skipped the tree, a lesson in humility; ``Trinity Sunday'' triggers memories of early loves for Karen Burton Mains; Philip Yancey learns the meaning of ``irreversible'' on ``Easter Sunday.'' Harold Fickett, Luci Shaw, John Leax, Gregory Wolfe, Calvin Miller, Shirley Nelson, and Stephen R. Lawhead round out the contributors, who invariably catch the essence of the holidays in well-mannered prose shimmering with images of candles, angels, a loving God. A clever conceit, carefully crafted—and just in time for Christmas.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-02-525430-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1992
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.
A mammoth edition, including the novel, illustrations, maps, a chronology, and bibliography, but mostly thousands of annotations that run the gamut from revealing to ridiculous.
New editions of revered works usually exist either to dumb down or to illuminate the original. Since its appearance in 1813, Austen's most famous work has spawned numerous illustrated and abridged versions geared toward younger readers, as well as critical editions for the scholarly crowd. One would think that this three-pounder would fall squarely in the latter camp based on heft alone. But for various other reasons, Shapard's edition is not so easily boxed. Where Austen's work aimed at a wide spectrum of the 19th-century reading audience, Shapard's seems geared solely toward young lit students. No doubt conceived with the notion of highlighting Austen's brilliance, the 2,000-odd annotations–printed throughout on pages facing the novel's text–often end up dwarfing it. This sort of arrangement, which would work extremely well as hypertext, is disconcerting on the printed page. The notes range from helpful glosses of obscure terms to sprawling expositions on the perils awaiting the character at hand. At times, his comments are so frequent and encyclopedic that one might be tempted to dispense with Austen altogether; in fact, the author's prefatory note under "plot disclosures" kindly suggests that first-time readers might "prefer to read the text of the novel first, and then to read the annotations and introduction." Those with a term paper due in the morning might skip ahead to the eight-page chronology–not of Austen's life, but of the novel's plot–at the back. In the end, Shapard's herculean labor of love comes off as more scholastic than scholarly.
An exhaustive and exhausting marriage of Austen's Pride and a modern reader’s analysis of it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-9745053-0-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Making movies may be ``hard work,'' as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clichÇs, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (``Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb''). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release—and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ``I love actors,'' he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and ``Betty'' Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network. Style, Lumet avers, is ``the way you tell a particular story''; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ``No one really knows.'' The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday.
Pub Date: March 27, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-43709-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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