A beautifully written and provocative account of a woman’s spiritual journey.
A personal memoir of a Jewish woman’s search for spiritual solace in Christianity.
Debut author Baker grew up in Columbia, South Carolina, wary of her proselytizing Protestant neighbors. Her father embraced his identity as a Jew culturally but was thoroughly secular at heart and even once confessed to being a nonbeliever. The author continued this legacy when she married her husband, Steve—a devotedly nonreligious man—in a ceremony performed by a rabbi. However, when her 9-year-old son, Michael, began to struggle with a series of emotional problems—including depression, eating disorders, ungovernably defiant behavior, and, finally, drug addiction—Baker found that she needed a kind of spiritual support that her secular worldview couldn’t provide. She turned to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible and interrogated the religious contours of her inherited, secular Jewishness; then, she became drawn to Christian teaching, particularly the ways that Jesus’ ministry explained the nature of suffering and the guilt that she didn’t realize that she harbored. She was ultimately baptized, but she was afraid that her conversion to Christianity would draw disapproval from her family members and Jewish friends, so she largely kept it secret for the next 15 years. She found that those who were closest to her were the least receptive to her conversion, including her husband, who saw their shared irreligiousness as one of the bedrocks of their relationship. Nevertheless, she says that her newfound faith helped her to cope with her son’s troubles, the death of her father, and her mother’s serious illness as well as her own diagnosed PTSD. Baker writes with a deeply felt spirituality, her prose often elegantly taking on the form of prayer: “I continue to write so that I can better know what I feel and think about a matter. As a form of communication, it resembles prayer—reaching deep into my psyche and speaking to a subconscious part of my soul.” She artfully braids revealing, confessional memoir with thought-provoking reflections on the nature of her spirituality, which dwells in the convergence of mystical Judaism and Christianity. Her search for faith is a rigorously intellectual one, conducted through the meticulous study of not only the Bible, but also philosophy and theology. Still, her remembrance never devolves into an arid, scholarly study. However, the author does have a tendency to bombard readers with a rapid-fire succession of quotations; this can be engaging at times, but it also produces a sense of distance from the author, as she communicates too frequently through the words of others. Her recollection is still powerfully moving, though, and told with courage and self-effacing humor. With great nuance, Baker describes the profound consolation that she found in Christ as a Jewish woman, and in the process, she makes a valuable contribution to a deeper understanding of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Finally, her account of abandoning earlier skepticism offers a fresh take on the possibility of détente between faith and reason.
A beautifully written and provocative account of a woman’s spiritual journey.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 168
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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