Evangelicals will be delighted, and most readers will at least be intrigued.
Uncritical but detailed biography of one of America’s most influential living religious figures.
U.S. News & World Report contributing editor Sheler (Is the Bible True?, 1999) provides a needed overview of the life of Rick Warren, founder of the 25,000-member Saddleback Church and author of the mega-seller The Purpose Driven Life (2002). The author’s near-hagiography glosses over most of the criticisms of Warren, but the book is accessible and provides important background for anyone with an interest in the preacher. Beginning with a historical discussion of Warren’s Southern Baptist upbringing, Sheler covers Warren’s parentage and adolescence. An accomplished teenage preacher, Warren was ordained at age 21. After completing a seminary degree, he and his wife moved to Southern California to start a new church from scratch. Warren had carefully studied the urban American landscape for places to begin ministry and settled on the Saddleback Valley area of Orange County. Beginning with a small Bible study group he cobbled together upon arriving, he launched a church in 1980 that would reach an attendance of 200 in less than a year. As the Saddleback Church grew by the thousands during the ensuing two decades, so did Warren’s role in the American Evangelical landscape. From his work leading ministerial conferences on evangelism came the bestselling book The Purpose Driven Church, followed by The Purpose Driven Life, a publishing success of the first order. This new renown drove Warren into unexpected circles of influence, exemplified by such experiences as receiving a phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu while waiting in line at Starbucks, or delivering the invocation for Barack Obama’s inauguration. In the final chapters of the book, Sheler looks at Warren’s struggle to stay focused on ministry and to refocus in light of his success and fame.
Evangelicals will be delighted, and most readers will at least be intrigued.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52395-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2009
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 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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