A valuable, wide-ranging Christian study of the book of Ezra, complete with life lessons.
A Christian writer examines the book of Ezra.
In this compact work, Robertson quickly gets down to the business of explaining and extrapolating the Old Testament book of Ezra. The author opens by asserting that “Ezra is an encapsulated recording of God’s work of redemption.” He relates that the work, written between 455 and 444 B.C., begins in 538 B.C. during the reign of the Persian King Cyrus. Robertson tells his readers that Ezra reveals the story of “how God rebuilt the national and spiritual life of Israel.” The author goes through the book section by section and passage by passage, expanding on the Israelites’ history outlined at each juncture. One of Ezra’s central points encompasses both the spiritual rebuilding of Israel and the literal reconstruction of the great Temple of Jerusalem. Robertson concentrates a great deal of his scholarly attention on the specific sequence of historical events alluded to throughout Ezra. (The author’s reference to a “simple man” in his volume’s title is belied a bit by his obviously extensive research and frequent references to the original Aramaic of his subject.) But Robertson also works in a liberal amount of Christian exhortation, mapping the literal content of Ezra onto broader Christian living applications. When writing about the process of rebuilding the Temple, for instance, he widens the focus smoothly. “You can not sneak into heaven!” he writes. “Every person called to God is to be a worker with and for God, to build His church.” Some of these elaborations take Robertson far afield of the technical study of his subject, usually into recognizably evangelical topics. “When we become Christians and invite Jesus to come into our hearts,” he writes at one point, “or when we renew our commitment to God after a period of living by and for ourselves, our enemy, Satan, hears our words and sees the change in our attitude and life.” The result is a very strong guide to Ezra and a thought-provoking, inspirational manual.
A valuable, wide-ranging Christian study of the book of Ezra, complete with life lessons.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973608-05-9
Page Count: 114
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
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