A strange and ultimately partisan reading of Christianity’s fate.
A firebrand interpretation of biblical Scripture envisions a unified faith.
Slobodzien (Hidden Bible Taboos Forbidden by Organized Christianity, 2012, etc.) opens his new book, a kind of follow-up to his preceding work, by urging readers to consider “the possibility that it may have been God’s plan from the beginning of time to unite all of his people into One Faith, One Hope, One Family—One Holy Nation!” But he begins his elaboration of this ambitious religious claim in the worst way possible: by misconstruing science, creating a false dichotomy between it and Christianity. His description of the Big Bang—“this speck of LIGHT (existing outside of space and time) appeared from nowhere, and for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden”—and his contention that “the ‘missing link’ (between the cave man and modern humans) is still missing” are some of the familiar fundamentalist misunderstandings he shares. Also in that category are his reference to creationism as a “theory” and preposterous claims like this one regarding the Nepililim mentioned in the Hebrew Bible: “Scientists today confirm the biblical record of these non-human species existing before God created Homo Sapiens (Adam and Eve) and after.” This opening section will likely repel readers who are non-fundamentalist Christians, resulting in their hesitation to plow through the rest of the book to discover the author’s insights. This is a shame, because once he gets down to the business of exegesis, analyzing the nature of Jesus and the true meaning of the prophesied Kingdom of God, he provides consistently compelling reading about “God’s ultimate plan to gather together all families through the shed blood of Jesus into his One Universal Holy Nation of ALL believers.” Some of these readings are rather odd. He characterizes Jesus as a “Cosmic King” foretold by Old Testament prophets. And the Book of Revelation does not identify the “Roman Catholic Institution” as the anti-Christ. But Slobodzien’s Christian readers should find his assessments intriguing nonetheless.
A strange and ultimately partisan reading of Christianity’s fate.Pub Date: April 20, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5413-9497-1
Page Count: 152
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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