by Franco Mormando ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999
Mormando’s (Italian/Boston Coll.) survey of the 40-year preaching career of the Franciscan friar and Catholic saint Bernardino of Siena (1380—1444) is one of only a few book-length studies on this mouthpiece of medieval obscurantism. This book further dismantles the view of the early Italian Renaissance as an enlightened period, exposing the fundamental fears and insecurities of the Quattrocento (feminine magical power, paganism, the body and sexuality, and Christianity’s inherent limitations) through the prism of Bernardino’s sermons dealing with witchcraft, sodomites, and Jews. The friar’s passionate call to denounce witches and burn them at the stake rests upon folklore beliefs that attribute to witches a number of grave sins, including infanticide, blood-sucking, and even fornication with the Devil. Bernardino was just as adamant about eradicating sodomy, by which he understood any sexual activity not leading to procreation. Passing on to Bernardino’s third scapegoat, the Jews, Mormando runs into a problem. While he seeks to downplay somewhat the saint’s notorious anti-Semitism, he advances unconvincing evidence. Indeed, the friar emerges here as a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite, who repeatedly referred to the Jews as the chief enemies of Christianity and proscribed any social or business contact between them and his followers. He also spoke in favor of isolating the Jews and ordering them to wear distinguishing badges. As for Bernardino’s occasional adjurations to “love the Jew with a general love,” this was no more than lip service to an abstract principle of brotherly love and cannot attenuate his responsibility for spreading hostility toward Jews. Unfortunately, Mormando paints his picture of the Quattrocento exclusively though this preacher’s eyes, without presenting the popular reaction to his message. Contrary to the book’s professed goal, we learn more about the anxieties of Bernardino’s tormented psyche and the intolerant streak in Catholicism than about the social underworld of early Renaissance Italy.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-226-53854-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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by Jon Krakauer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1996
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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