A landmark achievement.
In a lyrical, multilayered biography, a Georgetown classics scholar creates this generation’s Augustine.
O’Donnell’s study of Augustine’s life, work and influence would be worth the price of entry if it consisted only of the first 86 pages, which offer one of the most nuanced and sensitive readings ever of the Confessions (including an evenhanded investigation of why Augustine was so obsessed with chastity). O’Donnell reads the Confessions generously, but he also makes clear that the great autobiography is a literary work, not an unmediated picture of Augustine’s life. Throughout, O’Donnell draws on cutting-edge scholarship—including the hypothesis, based on Pierre-Marie Hombert’s 2000 study “New Investigations in Augustinian Chronology,” that Augustine may have risen to prominence later than scholars previously thought. There are no hints of hagiography here: indeed, O’Donnell likes to laugh a little at the great saint, and in a chapter entitled “Augustine Unvarnished,” he lays bear the African bishop’s ambition and social-climbing. O’Donnell’s rendering of the historical context is as important as his exegesis of Augustine. He limns fourth-century Christianity in order to show both how revolutionary some of Augustine’s own theological doctrines were, and how much those doctrines had to be “tamed” before they were embraced by the church. Along the way, he explains how Augustine literally wrote (he dictated, mainly) and explores “Augustine’s tongue” (that is, late antique Latin). And O’Donnell shows how Augustine remains germane to our world—“the idea that wisdom . . . lies in the pages of a book” is owed to Augustine, and, even more important, his idea of God still powerfully influences how Christians, Jews and Muslims understand the deity. Finally, this magisterial work is distinguished not only by its innovative scholarship, but also by O’Donnell’s elegant style—even the prose in the appendix on “Pursuing Augustine Further” is lovely (recommending Augustine’s sermons, the author writes that “Another place to lie in wait for him is in his church on Sunday morning.”)
A landmark achievement.Pub Date: April 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-053537-7
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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