Spoto insightfully demonstrates that far from taming the man, Francis’s canonization made his life and example a wonderful...
In an approachable biography, Spoto (The Hidden Jesus, 1998, etc.) shows how the saint was both a product of a historical moment and transcendent of it.
Francis was a “popular and endlessly inventive wastrel,” as one acquaintance remembered him as a young man: he was a participant in the burghers’ revolt, an aspirant to knighthood, a classic example of the every-man-for-himself type of the early mercantile economy. But he became disillusioned with life and deeply depressed—so goes Spoto’s reading of the documents. He also lived at a time when revelations were taken seriously, and Francis was ripe for the voice that called him to service in the tiny chapel of San Damiano. That call, to repair the chapel, was just a stepping stone to a larger perspective, to renovate the entire churchly institution, quietly and by example. Spoto takes up the pivotal moments in Francis’s life as they’re caught in the historical record and looks at them within their medieval context. He suggests how Francis’s commitment to the poor could fit within the chivalric tradition, situates his actions before the Bishop of Assisi within the popular methods of medieval argument, and shows how his mastery of the inclinations of the flesh found echoes in the ages-old custom of ascetics in their pursuit of spiritual clarity. That his fraternity devolved into schisms and hierarchy hardly reflected Francis’s conviction of his role: “The Lord told me what He wanted: He wanted me to be a new kind of fool in this world.” That is, a jester, a wandering minstrel of God running against the grain of wealth and privilege, full of generosity, forgiveness, and good works. For Spoto, he attained “a condition of spiritual integrity that always upsets public presumptions and counters the selfishness and madness of power.”
Spoto insightfully demonstrates that far from taming the man, Francis’s canonization made his life and example a wonderful embarrassment to the church.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03128-3
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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