An academic achievement with limited appeal for the nonscholarly audience.
A comprehensive biography of the famed reformer.
Biographical works about Martin Luther (1483-1546) abound. Here, former history professor Schilling (Early Modern European Civilization and Its Political and Cultural Dynamism, 2008, etc.) seeks to capture “the uncontaminated Luther.” As he writes, “this book is not about a Luther in whom we can find the spirit of our own time; this book is about…a Luther whose thoughts and actions are out of kilter with the interests of later generations.” The author portrays Luther in the context of his own time, but the long narrative is rather rambling and far better suited to academics than to general readers. Schilling begins with an in-depth exploration of Luther’s family background and youth, utilizing the name Luder, which Luther used up until his activism began in earnest. The author goes beyond the scope of most biographies by detouring into lengthy histories of towns involved in Luther’s story, the political landscape of the era, and profiles of individuals who were important in Luther’s life. Even Luther’s choice of clothing is carefully discussed. The further Schilling moves into the course of Luther’s story, the more intriguing his exploration of the sociopolitical events that framed the birth of the Reformation. The author makes it a point to dispute myths, none greater than Luther’s nailing the famed 95 theses to the Wittenberg Church door—he notes that if the list was nailed there at all, it was probably not done by Luther, and it was certainly not a dramatic event. Throughout, Schilling admirably avoids the fraught territory of psychoanalysis. His work will appeal most to readers who have exhausted other biographies of Luther and are looking for further minutia about the subject. For general readers seeking a meaningful but accessible biography, there are better choices, such as Derek Wilson’s Out of the Storm (2008).
An academic achievement with limited appeal for the nonscholarly audience.Pub Date: July 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-872281-6
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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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