by David Willey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2015
An interesting page-turner for the armchair Vatican-watcher.
A topical look at Pope Francis and his effect on the Catholic Church.
BBC Vatican correspondent Willey (God's Politician: Pope John Paul II, the Catholic Church, and the New World Order, 1992, etc.) adds to the collection of works on Pope Francis with an inside view from the Vatican. In a narrative alternating among biography, journalistic report, and historical analysis, the author examines the church Francis has inherited as well as his early effects on the church as a global institution. Willey focuses on specific issues facing the church or arising from the Francis papacy. After a short discussion of who Francis is and how he came to this role, the author dives right into the money crises facing the church in recent years, namely the corrupt and secretive nature of the Vatican bank. He moves on to discuss Francis’ views about women, demonstrating that in this vein, at least, the reformer has shown little signs of budging from the status quo. Willey goes on to address the worldwide sexual abuse scandal by Catholic priests and the pope’s mixed reactions toward it. Other issues discussed include the pope’s knack for communicating, both one-on-one and through mass media; his responsibility for the Vatican art collection; the church’s response toward homosexuals and divorced persons; and the future of the global church, with an emphasis on Asia. Readers looking for an introductory biography should search elsewhere; Willey’s goal is to present a more comprehensive look at the church and Francis together. His work is laden with historical discussions providing background for modern circumstances—for instance, several paragraphs are dedicated to explaining the intriguing history of Vatican Radio as background for understanding the pope’s current use of mass media). Willey’s take on the pope is certainly positive, and his views on the topics presented are always clear.
An interesting page-turner for the armchair Vatican-watcher.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8905-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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by David Willey
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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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 Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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