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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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