Impressively researched and insightful.
How a charismatic prophetess and her evangelical cult built a legacy in Palestine.
Tracing the life and times of Anna Spafford (1842–1923), Geniesse (Passionate Nomad: The Life of Freya Stark, 1999, etc.) illuminates the flowering of evangelical revivalism in post–Civil War Chicago, then follows a fervent band of its millennialist adherents to Ottoman-ruled Palestine. The orphaned child of Norwegian immigrants, Anna Lawson (née Larsen) first caught the eye of her Sunday school teacher, lawyer Horatio Spafford, when only 15. They later married, and Anna grew to share his conviction that Jesus Christ would be imminently arriving in Jerusalem to save the entire world—even Satan. After financial setbacks and the horrendous loss of their four daughters in a steamship sinking, the pair convinced a small group of like-minded believers to accompany them to the Holy City in 1881, fully expecting, the author relates, to participate in the Second Coming. Feeding the hungry and aiding the sick irrespective of ethnicity or religion, The Overcomers (as they had been known since Chicago days) quickly won the respect of Arab, Jew and Turk alike in a place woefully lacking amenities and sanitation. Bolstered by international recruits, the group became polyglot and often contentious; its evolution played out as a highly strung spiritual soap opera. By the time of Horatio’s death in 1888, Anna had made herself the sole “conduit to God” and usurped total authority. Her passions and proclivities waxed and waned: First she ordained celibacy, then later relented and became ultimate matchmaker. Weakened over the decades by the antipathy of U.S. consular officials, the group eventually dissolved, leaving as its legacy Jerusalem’s popular American Colony Hotel and a clinic that treats indigent children of all backgrounds.
Impressively researched and insightful.Pub Date: June 17, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-51926-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2008
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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