A candid and thoughtful reflection on faith, reason, and art.
A debut memoir explores a young man’s upbringing in the Mormon Church and his flight from it.
Hansen was born in Washington state but raised in Hawaii to be a devoted member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He chose to undertake a two-year Mormon mission—he was assigned in Germany—when he was 19 years old. But his faith was repeatedly challenged by contradictions within the religion and his desire to become a writer free from conformist dogma of any kind. As a result, his faith withered over time. He married a woman he helped convert to Mormonism in Germany—he was 23 and she was 18—and he ultimately moved back to the country after returning home to marry her, study medieval German literature, and work as a journalist. But as his attachment to his religion evaporated, so did the bonds of matrimony. After he committed an infidelity, the marriage ended in divorce. While Hansen’s recollection is largely a personal one, he also furnishes a short history of the birth of Mormonism and founder Joseph Smith’s 19th-century ministry. Furthermore, the author discusses the basic theological principles of Mormon doctrine, including issues as diverse as the Trinity and the sexual significance of the so-called “magic underwear.” Hansen’s conversion experience to secular nonbeliever, though, wasn’t a bitter one laced with resentment at deception. He deftly describes Mormons in mostly positive passages, arguing that they are generally successful, healthy, family-oriented people who prize education and personal growth and are open to progressive change. The author, in limpid prose, fleshes out a fascinatingly complex religion, which he convincingly argues is the most American of spiritual traditions. In addition, his philosophical restraint is admirable—far from repudiating Mormonism, the author actually succeeds in broadening and deepening the terms of its appraisal: “Back when I was a church member, the question of Smith’s charlatanism bothered me. Now that I have left the church, I see the story differently—not as a question of true or untrue, but as an aspect of his humanity.”
A candid and thoughtful reflection on faith, reason, and art.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-3-946213-12-3
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Hula Ink
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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