A thoroughly absorbing though not entirely credible analysis of the Branch Davidian movement and critique of America's stance toward ``cults.'' Both specialists in religion, Tabor (Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte) and Gallagher (Connecticut College) convincingly contend that the tragedy at Waco, Tex., that resulted in the deaths of 4 federal agents and 80 Branch Davidians could easily have been averted. David Koresh and his followers had been open to communicating with ``biblically oriented'' peopleincluding Tabor, who was kept a marginal player by the government in the tragically inadequate final negotiations. Koresh, argue Tabor and Gallagher, would only emerge from his Mt. Carmel siege after receiving ``word from God.'' The government authorities, however, did not understand that any `` `surrender' could only be worked out through dialogue within the biblical framework in which the Branch Davidians lived.'' In presenting their account of the events, Tabor and Gallagher tend to grant the Branch Davidians and their leader a theological and psychological legitimacy that will be challenged by many readers. It is difficult to accept, for example, that Koresh was acting from sincere religious conviction (in the need to spread his messianic seed) when he took all the group's married women and adolescent girls as his sexual partners, while demanding celibacy from the rest of the compound's males. Tabor and Gallagher believe that the stance of anticultists is based on misunderstandings and distortions of ``charismatic leadership . . . the process of conversion, and . . . similarities between the Peoples Temple and other new religious movements.'' The authors view the government's maltreatment of the Davidians as symptomatic of society's intolerance toward unconventional religious groups and an abridgement of religious freedom. But Koresh seems to have posed more of a threat to individual freedom than the authors are willing to concede. Provocative and challenging, the questions raised here deserve to be answered as the ashes from Waco and Oklahoma City still settle.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-520-20186-8
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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