Crisp, interpretive biography, taking intelligent measure of its controversial subject. (8 pp. photos, not seen)
A careful depiction of the haunted energy of a radical Episcopalian bishop.
James A. Pike wore his cloth at the vanguard of his time, the 1950s and ’60s. Not that his sentiments were original—“My notions are all derived from other people,” he once admitted. “I just get behind the ones I like”—but he spoke them before substantial audiences, first as dean of St. John the Divine in New York City and then as bishop of the San Francisco diocese, with enough fervency to have him brought up on heresy charges by his fellow bishops. Yet, writes Robertson (Denmark Vesey, 1999, etc.), Pike wouldn’t have attained those posts without a high degree of intellect and influence. He could raise money (always a big plus), and he brought his brand of “smells and bells,” High Church, Catholic Anglicanism into the limelight. He also brought forward social activism against racism and the war in Vietnam, a cheerful friendliness to nonbelievers, a nonjudgmental welcome to homosexuals, and receptiveness to the idea of ordaining women. These stances vexed many in the church hierarchy, but it wasn’t until he denied the virgin birth that they decided he was a candidate for the stake. The rumpus room of Pike’s personal life followed him like an evil shadow, his biographer explains; a civil-court divorce judgment without ecclesiastical validity, alcoholism, fiddling with the evidence of a lover’s suicide, all gave ammunition to his enemies, along with his belief in parapsychology and speaking in tongues. Yet Pike was also the man who brought the Niebuhrs and Paul Tillich to Columbia University, who fought for birth control and against Joseph McCarthy, who practically defined apologetics. A complex man, in other words: reckless, restless, a force urging an examination of limits, faith, and forgiveness.
Crisp, interpretive biography, taking intelligent measure of its controversial subject. (8 pp. photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-41187-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
