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 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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