A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the...
George Washington: soldier, patriot, president—saint? This book parses the founding father’s achievements through the lens of Christian theology, making some surprising observations along the way.
Blending the mythical and the historical to convey the holiness of its subject, this book is neither strictly a history nor a biography. Connell (The Secrets of Mary, 2010, etc.) details apocrypha unaddressed in the work of mainstream biographers: Washington’s seemingly mystical imperviousness to musket fire, his supernatural vision at Valley Forge and, Connell argues, his deathbed conversion to Catholicism. Like most hagiographers, Connell begins with a committed belief that her subject is uniquely touched by God, and the book is largely a rhetorical exercise in proving the truth of that assumption. This becomes uncomfortable since, of course, Washington is not a saint recognized by the Catholic Church; many scholars agree he was not Catholic, either, though he was, in fact, a Mason—a significant aspect of his spirituality that goes unmentioned here. The worshipful tone of Connell’s prose—“history has canonized” Washington, she says, describing him as a “mystical icon of heroic grace”—may rankle secular readers as well as the true faithful, who might justifiably wonder if either the author or the subject can claim legitimacy to such assertions. Although Connell never actually classifies Washington as a saint or argues outright for his beatification, and she never describes his exploits as miracles, her point is nevertheless clear and in concert with Catholic theology: God, or “Kind Providence” (Washington’s preferred term), actively worked through the great leader and chose him to found the new nation by God’s grace. This conviction leads Connell to some observations about American political philosophy that will delight some readers and provoke others, not least of which is the assertion that the Declaration of Independence and Constitution are rooted in the Bible. But in the end, all serious scholars agree that Washington was, indeed, a devout Christian, and the primary source material Connell has gathered here—including little-examined oral histories that deal with his spirituality—make her book a valuable addition to existing scholarship.
A heartfelt exploration of Washington’s Christianity that will find an appreciative audience among both the faithful and the patriotic.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2013
ISBN: 978-1489589668
Page Count: 246
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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