In the context of his career writing biographies of media celebrities (Laurence Olivier, Elizabeth Taylor, Alfred Hitchcock, among many others) Spoto’s claim about God in this devotional life of Jesus—that he “identifies not with the great or famous or beautiful,” but with the simple and selfless—carries the persuasive backing of one who should know. Before becoming a professional writer, Spoto taught Catholic theology. In his introduction, he explains that his prolonged attentions to the rich and famous have never eclipsed his still stronger interest in religious life. In this book, he applies his cumulative biographical writing skills to his object of faith. The hidden Jesus of the title is the divine Christ who exceeds our conceptual reach but who, eternally alive, presents himself to faithful Christians in their personal life. The subtitle is misleading. The book is less a life of Jesus than a devotional commentary on the Gospels; and it’s not so much new—except, perhaps, for the author—as uncommon (for a non-Frenchman) in its mix of Catholic doctrine and existential philosophy. Spoto follows the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ life from birth to resurrection, arguing along the way against the Virgin Birth, biblical literalism, and princely aspirations in the Catholic Church and its clergy. On two points he sends a mixed message: women and Judaism. While defending the idea of women priests, he objects to feminine pronouns for God, illogically, on grounds that “God as ‘She’ is neither any better or worse than God as ‘He.”’ And he perpetuates the very anti- Semitism, he decries in the New Testament when he locates the Jewish objection to Jesus in the presumed arrogance of the first-century priests and Pharisees, rather than in disagreement over the nature of revelation: whether it was ongoing—into the first century—in received texts or in prophetic individuals. This book would have more honest appeal repackaged as an earnest meditation on the Gospels by an unorthodox Catholic.
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-19282-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
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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