The noted German theologian and preacher (190886) looks back over his experiences and involvement in his country's 20th-century upheavals. Author of many books dealing with faith and ethics, Thielicke (The Waiting Father, not reviewed, etc.) was the son of a puritanical mother and a highly imaginative, emotional father. Surviving the famine and chaos following Germany's defeat in WW I, he was drawn to theology because it addressed life's eternal questions. Thielicke's own faith only came into focus, however, after a brush with death following surgery. He pursued his doctoral studies under the famous Zen scholar Eugen Herrigel, then served as professor of theology at Heidelberg until his dismissal by the Nazis in 1940, after which he worked as a pastor in the Swabian countryside. Although Thielicke made his opposition to the regime clear, he managed to evade arrest, and thousands flocked to his sermons in Stuttgart, where he spoke compellingly of the ultimate questions of life, death, and faith amidst the Allied bombings. After the war, he served as rector at the University of TÅbingen and subsequently founded the faculty of theology at Hamburg. Ironically, his academic career ended during the student revolts of the 1960s, which he saw as employing the same tactics as the Nazis had used earlier; he devoted his final years to writing and lecturing. Thielicke's many anecdotes (some of them hilarious) deal with simple peasants, students, famous political figures such as Konrad Adenauer, and theologians Karl Barth, Romano Guardini, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This book, written in 1983, contains observations that are always thoughtful and incisive, whether Thielicke is speaking about German complacency with the Third Reich or giving his penetrating impressions of American life and religion. He emerges as a lovable man of great integrity. A humane testament of an eventful life, recounted with depth and humor.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55778-708-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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