Metaxas gives the men their rightful due without lapsing into hagiography.
Metaxas presents profiles of seven men he considers manly exemplars.
The great slide into unmanliness, writes Metaxas (Bonhoeffer, 2010, etc.), began with the Vietnam War and the presidency of Richard Nixon, a time of ignorance, venality and shame, when many called nearly all authority into question. When the young turned to role models, they were more likely Cheech and Chong than Westmoreland and McNamara. But do we really have to settle for the macho meatheads or the “emasculated...pretend[ing] that there is no real difference between men and women,” asks the author? Certainly not, he writes, for “God’s idea of manhood is something else entirely”—no “loudmouthed bullies or soft, emasculated pseudo-men,” but strong, loving, chivalrous, service-oriented men who use authority for leadership, not personal advancement. Jesus lords over this book—“My own personal greatest role model is Jesus”—but Metaxas has chosen another seven men who surrendered themselves to a high purpose and sacrificed to do the right thing. There is a goodly measure of zeal in Metaxas’ style, and Jesus shares the credit with the acts of the seven men: George Washington, who could have been king but declined, and William Wilberforce, for his abolitionist stance and fights against child labor, alcoholism and animal cruelty in the 19th century. The author also includes Eric Liddell, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Jackie Robinson, Pope John Paul II and, less convincingly, Charles Colson, perhaps only due to the fact that he was such an unsavory character before he found his calling in prison.
Metaxas gives the men their rightful due without lapsing into hagiography.Pub Date: April 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59555-469-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
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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