A Woody Allen–esque tale of an uneasy conscience in Christian America.
A mild, witty memoir by an activist atheist and founder of the Secular Coalition for America.
Retired professor of mathematics at the College of Charleston, in South Carolina, a native Philadelphian and a nonpracticing Jew, Silverman delights in contradictions and provocation, such as debating the existence of God with fundamentalists in the Deep South. The author has advocated for years to help empower the non-theistic constituency, most of whom believe morality should be dictated by tried-and-true “human judgments” rather than biblical judgments—which, while fashioning the Golden Rule, he notes, have also been used to condone slavery, anti-Semitism, misogyny and horrendous violence. The only child of “cultural Jews,” Silverman chronicles the not-so-small hypocrisies that he witnessed in adults around him, such as their conviction that the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 was “good for Jews” and that the games their beloved Philadelphia Phillies played against the Brooklyn Dodgers weren’t worthy of their attendance because “of undesirable people (blacks) who came to watch [Jackie] Robinson play.” Once he mastered biblical readings as part of his bar mitzvah training, Silverman debated two thoughts with his young self: “either the God of the Bible didn’t exist, or he could be as bad as and more powerful than Adolph Hitler.” God and sex were forbidden topics in his childhood home, and his early years learning about girls and how to care for himself make for charming reading. Enmeshed in his teaching career, he became radicalized during the incendiary ’60s and ’70s and later ran for numerous offices, such as governor of South Carolina in 1990 (he lost). The book skips around erratically, somewhat thematically, and dwells at length on his atheist beliefs.
A Woody Allen–esque tale of an uneasy conscience in Christian America.Pub Date: June 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9844932-8-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Pitchstone Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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
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
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