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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
