Some readers may tire of the uniform patterns of the chapters and the author’s dispassionate voice, but vast research...
A scholarly, analytical and sympathetic biography of the evangelist Billy Graham (b. 1918), who for decades was what the title proclaims.
Wacker (Christian History/Duke Univ.; Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals in American Culture, 2001, etc.) is not interested in exploring Graham’s personal life (although some cannot be avoided). Instead, he offers a thematic approach, looking at Graham through a variety of lenses and trusting that this multiple-image approach gives readers a more comprehensive portrait of this unique man—and it does. Although some readers might wish for more National Enquirer or People magazine (and still others for either a paean or a disembowelment), Wacker sticks to his objectives throughout, and so we emerge with a more complete, nuanced understanding of Graham’s personality and ministry. The titles of Wacker’s chapters tell the story: “Preacher,” “Entrepreneur,” “Pastor,” “Patriarch” and others. In each section, the author focuses on what Graham said and wrote—though the latter is sometimes difficult to determine, for once he became successful, Graham employed a number of “editorial assistants” and, with their help, produced more than 30 books and countless sermons, newspaper columns and other writings. (Graham did not preach from a text, but he did have topics listed.) About the best Wacker can say is that the ideas were always Graham’s, if not all the words. The author also shows us a profoundly authentic Graham, a true believer, a man who was not mercenary, who practiced what he preached, whose principal weaknesses might have been his name-dropping and hobnobbing with the rich and the powerful—including American presidents. (He liked Nixon and prayed with Clinton; only Truman disdained him.)
Some readers may tire of the uniform patterns of the chapters and the author’s dispassionate voice, but vast research composes the foundation of a very sturdy structure.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-0674052185
Page Count: 398
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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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