An intriguing, if highly flawed, combination of memoir and polemic on why a ``Bible-thumping Baptist'' minister renounces his Christian faith and helps create the new quasi=Jewish group, Bnai Noah Raised in the heart of the Bible belt, in rural Georgia, Davis traces his growing doubts about what he sees as the ahistoricism and irrationality of Christian doctrine, including Jesus' virgin birth and divinity. Also feeling increasing disgust at the corruption of many evangelical preachers, he becomes interested in Christianity's Jewish roots, then in the Torah and Talmud themselves. Still working out of his church in Athens, Tenn., Davis helps organize others who intensely study, preach, and practice the seven ethical principles (such as prohibitions against illicit intercourse, theft, and murder) that God commands Adam and Noah, and through them all humans, to observe. All this is presented in fairly compelling prose. Unfortunately, Davis considerably undermines his presentation through an uncritical embrace of much of the theology and politics of some of the less appealing leaders of Orthodox Judaism; for example, he refers to the late, racist Rabbi Meir Kahane as ``a giant in courage.'' In addition, he frequently resorts to the gratingly absolutist, stridently self- righteous rhetoric of the radical true believer, so that he declares that ``Torah is a book of reality and everything else is fantasy,'' something most definitely not preached by classical Judaism. Finally, his work is highly uneven in its presentation of details. At one point, Davis offers pages of his arcane notes contrasting baptism and immersion in the mikveh (the Jewish ritual bath). Yet later, he alludes to, but never really details, the nature of Bnai Noah funeral. Davis helps us appreciate much of traditional Judaism and pursues his intellectual and communal work in the fascinating lacunae between the Christian and Jewish communities. But the subject of the Bnai Noah awaits a more balanced and thoughtful presentation.
Pub Date: June 25, 1996
ISBN: 0-88125-535-1
Page Count: 236
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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