by Daniel Mark Epstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1993
Powerhouse biography of perhaps the most charismatic and controversial woman in modern religious history. Although now less than a household name, Aimee Semple McPherson dominated the American spiritual landscape of six or seven decades ago. Her Pentecostal meetings, held first in tents and then in the gigantic Angelus Temple she built in Los Angeles, attracted millions of admirers. The media lionized her. The denomination she founded, the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel, today boasts 17,000 churches worldwide. Epstein (Love's Compass, 1990, etc.) seems half in love with his subject, and understandably so. He emphasizes her ``angelic and foxlike'' beauty, her erotic magnetism as a preacher; he takes her side in the great controversy of her life—her mysterious month-long disappearance in 1927, which she ascribed to a foiled kidnapping and her detractors to a romantic fling with her radio operator. Most notably, Epstein is able to write about ``miracles'' like glossolalia and faith healing (at McPherson's services, the deaf heard and the blind walked, or so eyewitnesses reported) without sneering—or, for that matter, without fawning. He presents the evidence, offers nonreligious (mostly psychoanalytical) explanations, and points out their shortcomings. The author seems to have gathered every scrap of material on McPherson, including such odd items as her surreptitious friendship with atheist Charlie Chaplin and her kind words to a teenaged Anthony Quinn, who played saxophone at her Temple. Epstein never skimps on details, whether limning McPherson's triumphs or her many falls—into depression, nervous breakdowns, loneliness, bad marriages, lawsuits. But this is anything but a lifeless patchwork: The author's admiration and his subject's breathtaking story give the narrative abundant energy. Holy-roller religion at its best, told with fire.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-15-182688-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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