A clear-eyed, sometimes-colorful account of a missionary’s life and times.
A biography of an early-20th-century American Presbyterian missionary in Pakistan.
Debut author McRight’s grandfather, Bible scholar and missionary Robert Maxwell (1871-1946), died just three days after her birth. She lays out his life story, drawing on family accounts and wider world events, and often quoting letters directly. Maxwell and his sister, Elizabeth, wrote to each other faithfully during the years that he lived in Pakistan, producing a large cache of correspondence, now held by Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Historical Society: “Reading Grandfather’s letters was a good reminder that…we cannot presume to change a culture or impose on its people our own assumptions about the way the world works,” the author writes. Maxwell, who was educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and Allegheny Seminary, was respectful of Pakistan’s local culture; he learned Urdu to preach in the vernacular, simultaneously “devoting himself to education and evangelism” as the manager of Boys High School in Rawalpindi. His wife, Maud, taught at the girls’ school, and they eventually had four sons; two of them, George and Pollock, followed their father into ministry (as did the author, now retired). Maxwell later served on the executive committee of the Presbyterian synod’s New World Movement ecumenical missions program and surveyed schools and hospitals in Gujranwala. Over four decades, he pondered the Anglo and Christian influence in the Pakistan area and witnessed rising unrest, including Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 march to protest the British salt tax. Overall, this is a touching tribute to an unassuming, dedicated man with a keen sense of purpose. The author sometimes inserts generic pages of political and social history to move the biography along. However, she re-creates some scenes in Maxwell’s life with real verve, such as one in which he encountered a cobra while bathing. At other points, McRight makes readers eyewitnesses to her grandfather’s birth and infuses good sensory details into a sequence outside his college boardinghouse. A few more scenes as vivid as these would have been welcome, although the family photographs, and especially the letters, do give readers a real sense of Maxwell’s personality.
A clear-eyed, sometimes-colorful account of a missionary’s life and times.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973632-54-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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