A rigorously researched and lucidly presented account of a philosopher’s extraordinary journey.
A historical novel that chronicles the trials and triumphs of the great Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides.
Moses ben Maimon, more widely known historically as Moses Maimonides, grows up in Córdoba during Spain’s “golden age,” during which not only prosperity reigns, but also religious tolerance, which permits adherents of the three Abrahamic faiths to live and worship side by side. Still, Jews are considered “dhimmis”—second-class citizens, below Muslims. But after the generally lenient Almoravid rulers are replaced by draconian Almohads, Maimonides and his family face a stark choice: flee, convert, or die. In his debut novel, Taylor (Medicine/Univ. Coll. London) details Maimonides’ lifelong search for a safe environment—one that’s stable enough for him to pursue his monumentally significant intellectual ambitions. Maimonides’ family finally flees Córdoba, and then Spain entirely, and after aborted attempts to settle in Morocco and Palestine, they finally find a home in Egypt. While in Morocco, Maimonides nominally converts to Islam but continues to secretly worship as a Jew—a criminal apostasy that’s punishable by death. The author deftly charts Maimonides’ intellectual development, particularly his attempt to reconcile supernatural elements of the Jewish faith with natural science: “He remained convinced of the importance of the scientific method, of the need for independent observation, and of the requirement to be rational in delivering treatment.” Taylor’s command of the details of Maimonides’ life, as well as the cultural and political features of the historical period, is simply magisterial. His account of his subject’s valiant attempt to preserve the Jewish culture and its ancient repository of biblical teachings is as engaging as it is moving. The prose is unfailingly clear throughout, but it’s more academic than literary in tone, and it reads more like scholarly history than literary fiction. Nevertheless, the author shows Maimonides’ life to be both dramatically thrilling and philosophically important.
A rigorously researched and lucidly presented account of a philosopher’s extraordinary journey.Pub Date: March 22, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5462-9755-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.
Doerr presents us with two intricate stories, both of which take place during World War II; late in the novel, inevitably, they intersect.
In August 1944, Marie-Laure LeBlanc is a blind 16-year-old living in the walled port city of Saint-Malo in Brittany and hoping to escape the effects of Allied bombing. D-Day took place two months earlier, and Cherbourg, Caen and Rennes have already been liberated. She’s taken refuge in this city with her great-uncle Etienne, at first a fairly frightening figure to her. Marie-Laure’s father was a locksmith and craftsman who made scale models of cities that Marie-Laure studied so she could travel around on her own. He also crafted clever and intricate boxes, within which treasures could be hidden. Parallel to the story of Marie-Laure we meet Werner and Jutta Pfennig, a brother and sister, both orphans who have been raised in the Children’s House outside Essen, in Germany. Through flashbacks we learn that Werner had been a curious and bright child who developed an obsession with radio transmitters and receivers, both in their infancies during this period. Eventually, Werner goes to a select technical school and then, at 18, into the Wehrmacht, where his technical aptitudes are recognized and he’s put on a team trying to track down illegal radio transmissions. Etienne and Marie-Laure are responsible for some of these transmissions, but Werner is intrigued since what she’s broadcasting is innocent—she shares her passion for Jules Verne by reading aloud 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. A further subplot involves Marie-Laure’s father’s having hidden a valuable diamond, one being tracked down by Reinhold von Rumpel, a relentless German sergeant-major.
Doerr captures the sights and sounds of wartime and focuses, refreshingly, on the innate goodness of his major characters.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-4658-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.
High adventure fraught with cliffhanger twists marks this runaway-slave narrative, which leaps, sails, and soars from Caribbean cane fields to the fringes of the frozen Arctic and across a whole ocean.
It's 1830 on the island of Barbados, and a 12-year-old slave named George Washington Black wakes up every hot morning to cruelties administered to him and other black men, women, and children toiling on a sugar plantation owned by the coldblooded Erasmus Wilde. Christopher, one of Erasmus’ brothers, is a flamboyant oddball with insatiable curiosity toward scientific matters and enlightened views on social progress. Upon first encountering young Wash, Christopher, also known as Titch, insists on acquiring him from his brother as his personal valet and research assistant. Neither Erasmus nor Wash is pleased by this transaction, and one of the Wildes' cousins, the dour, mysterious Philip, is baffled by it. But then Philip kills himself in Wash’s presence, and Christopher, knowing the boy will be unjustly blamed and executed for the death, activates his hot air balloon, the Cloud-cutter, to carry both himself and Wash northward into a turbulent storm. So begins one of the most unconventional escapes from slavery ever chronicled as Wash and Titch lose their balloon but are carried the rest of the way to America by a ship co-captained by German-born twins of wildly differing temperaments. Once in Norfolk, Virginia, they meet with a sexton with a scientific interest in dead tissue and a moral interest in ferrying other runaway slaves through the Underground Railroad. Rather than join them on their journey, Wash continues to travel with Titch for a reunion with the Wildes' father, an Arctic explorer, north of Canada. Their odyssey takes even more unexpected turns, and soon Wash finds himself alone and adrift in the unfamiliar world as “a disfigured black boy with a scientific turn of mind…running, always running from the dimmest of shadows.” Canadian novelist Edugyan (Half-Blood Blues, 2012, etc.) displays as much ingenuity and resourcefulness as her main characters in spinning this yarn, and the reader’s expectations are upended almost as often as her hero’s.
A thoughtful, boldly imagined ripsnorter that broadens inventive possibilities for the antebellum novel.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-52142-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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