A lively, invaluable, and evaluative Bible reference work, for both believers and nonbelievers.
A debut book offers a comprehensive historical analysis of the events of the Old Testament.
In this long work, Sulman’s goal is to subject the Old Testament to a claim-by-claim, virtually line-by-line verification test, to determine which if any of the assertions of the Hebrew Bible are historically accurate. He sifts through these contentions in careful, direct, and fast-paced chapters that are grounded in considerable scholarship and yet immediately accessible to the nonspecialist, all of it guided by an appealingly straightforward spirit of inquiry. “To find out when the Exodus took place looks so simple,” Sulman writes in a typical passage, “just take an incident in Egypt’s history that is also described in the Bible, and then use this as an anchor point.” This may seem like an impossible task for the Old Testament’s far more fanciful stories, but Sulman tackles them all, from Noah’s Flood to David and Goliath to the Tower of Babel to the career of Moses to the Mystery of the Lost Ark (“Nobody has found it yet, and nobody ever will,” the author writes, concluding that King Josiah destroyed the venerated object). All of this is rendered in clear, calm prose that only occasionally descends to snark. (“They killed about three thousand people that day,” readers are told about Moses ordering his people to slaughter their neighbors. “Apparently, that was not enough punishment, because the LORD now struck the people with a plague.”) The prose sometimes shows signs of haste uncorrected by a patient editor (“the worship of the golden calf worship is portrayed as an act by which the people broke the covenant,” for example), but the scrupulous revisionist passion at the heart of the extremely impressive volume more than compensates for such easily ignored (and readily fixed) little gaffes. That ardor extends to reminding readers that the original Hebrew religion was exuberantly polytheistic for most of its history, and that female and male prostitution occurred in the Temple of Jerusalem. Throughout the engrossing book, Sulman is respectful but not reverential, blunt yet not insulting, and, in the end, tremendously informative.
A lively, invaluable, and evaluative Bible reference work, for both believers and nonbelievers.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0113-8
Page Count: 670
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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