by Ingrid D. Rowland ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 26, 2008
Dense and elegantly erudite—a skillful, accessible analysis of complex systems of religion, philosophy and literature.
Intelligent biography of the renegade Italian friar burned at the stake in 1600 for his prodigious writings prefiguring modern science.
Rowland (The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery, 2004, etc.) leavens her vast scholarly knowledge of Renaissance church history with a sprightly stylistic touch. Born in 1548 in a small city east of Naples, Bruno journeyed from the convent of San Domenico Maggiore through the exalted universities of Europe and England to test and deepen his theories of natural philosophy, with the Inquisition nipping at his heels all the while. From his first years as a Dominican friar, he entertained doubts about the “personhood” of Jesus, and his lack of reverence for the Catholic icons raised suspicions of Protestant leanings at a time when the Church was riven by the Reformation. Steeped in Aquinas, Aristotle and Plato, Bruno was also strongly influenced by the emotional rhetoric of Teofilo da Vairano and the Platonic philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, among others, and he delved into the Hebrew Kabbalah. Pursued by Venetian inquisitors for irreverence and harboring banned books, the exiled and excommunicated friar moved from Genoa to Geneva, Lyon to Paris, London to the Protestant German cities, teaching artificial memory, astrology, theology and mathematics, honing his philosophy. Finally, he discovered the work of German cardinal Nicolaus Cusanus, who proposed the idea that the universe might be infinitely large. In Bruno’s poetic, atomic system, set out in On the Immense, he touched on the concept of infinite space and time, a “universal divine fertility” in which God was present everywhere. Returning to Venice in 1591, he was eventually denounced by his employer and spent eight years in prison while the Inquisition debated what to do with him. When he was condemned to death, he replied menacingly, “You may be more afraid to bring that sentence against me than I am to accept it.”
Dense and elegantly erudite—a skillful, accessible analysis of complex systems of religion, philosophy and literature.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8090-9524-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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