by Jack N. Rakove ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 3, 2020
A worthwhile look at a freedom too often taken for granted.
Historical review of America’s concept of freedom of religion.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Inalienable Rights series, Pulitzer Prize winner Rakove uses a historical rather than legal approach, providing a balanced and intriguing look at the origins of religious freedom. The author discusses the conflicts, theories, and personalities that led to the creation of the religion clauses of the First Amendment, and then he tracks how that amendment was tested throughout American history, both judicially and culturally. He begins, necessarily, with the experience in mainland Europe and England, demonstrating how many of the rights we take for granted have roots in strife and inequality. The irony of living in a society that promotes religious freedom is that “one no longer needs to know what religious toleration originally meant.” Indeed, this is Rakove’s most significant contribution: causing readers to look past the legal story and realize the social, cultural, and philosophical elements involved in the modern idea of freedom of religion. After exploring the writings of John Locke and the experience of Puritans and early Colonial dissenters, the author discusses the vital roles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in translating theories of tolerance into codified law and practice. Looking at the 19th century, Rakove shows how growing numbers of Catholic immigrants and the advent of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints strained the concept of religious freedom in a Protestant-centered America. The 20th century brought further tension, especially where religious conviction ran up against government and civil activity. In the end, Rakove echoes Madison by concluding that greater disestablishment leads to a healthier, freer practice of religion. Though academic in tone, the book will be accessible to diligent readers.
A worthwhile look at a freedom too often taken for granted.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-530581-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2020
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
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