by Fenton Johnson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2003
Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.
Novelist and memoirist Johnson (Geography of the Heart, 1996, etc.) details his journey from bitter skeptic to man of renewed faith.
Like the best writers on religion, Johnson never flinches at describing his own doubts, anger, and skepticism about its practices, but he is also scrupulously fair and open-minded. Raised Roman Catholic in a family of nine, he stopped believing in his teenage years and as a gay man is angry with his church for its attitudes about homosexuality and sex. Early in 1996, he accepted an invitation from a brother at the Trappist Monastery of Gethsemani in Kentucky to attend an international convocation of Buddhist and Christian monks and lay contemplatives. He thought the experience might be useful for a novel he was planning, but instead found himself embarking on “a cross-country journey through the briars and thistles of faith, and (its traveling companion) desire,” searching for “what it means to have and keep the faith.” As Johnson records his experiences, memories of his past mix with accounts of his stays at Gethsemani and at two Buddhist centers in northern California. He observed and participated in the daily rituals, learning to meditate and work in silence with the Buddhists, attending the various services each day at the Monastery. Seamlessly blending personal experiences with historical and theological research, making numerous references to the Bible and Buddhist writings, as well as thinkers from Augustine and Plato, the author explores the connections among Christianity, Judaism, Greek philosophy, and Eastern religions. The early Christian church accepted women as equals, he writes, but today’s male-dominated organization has failed in its handling of desire and sexuality. Despite such criticisms, as his journey nears its end, Johnson has regained his faith, understanding now that belief is not a narrow creed, but “a form for and discipline of the imagination that preserves and promotes faith.”
Richly allusive, impressively lucid, and unflinchingly honest: Johnson speaks as eloquently to the heart as to the head.Pub Date: April 16, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-00442-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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