For true believers only—in atheism, that is. Students of the business of religion will find only occasional pearls.
Middling account of an evangelical’s 180, written with the assistance of co-author Brown (Shake the Devil Off: A True Story of the Murder that Rocked New Orleans, 2009, etc.).
Saul required a vision from Yahweh and a fall from a donkey before trading in his publican job for sainthood. DeWitt, a Louisiana-born, peripatetic pastor, drifted away from faith with no such drama, just a gradual whittling away of his former beliefs—and while dramatic moments are relatively few in most people’s lives, they do help keep a story moving along. In this instance, a death of a cousin helped rattle DeWitt’s nerves, as did a long spell of disappointing encounters with prophets ultimately suspected to be false (“my shaky, tentative faith in the fanatical, me-first teachings of Brother Goodwin was shored up by more practical, Earthly concerns”). DeWitt’s repudiation of hard-shell Protestantism is one thing; his neighbor’s resulting repudiation of him and the joblessness and divorce that accompanied his fall from grace complete the package. What is more interesting to nonevangelical readers is not really DeWitt’s journey into the wilderness but instead his encounter of the business of preaching—and business it is, as his early hero Jimmy Swaggart well knew. The author notes that there’s a difference between mere preaching and tent-show revivalism (“as a preacher at a revival it is your job to evangelize to the congregants and then they, in turn, evangelize to their community”). Indifferently written and slow-moving, DeWitt’s testimonial is a test of patience. There is one valuable takeaway, though: his reckoning that “the majority of ministers that I have learned to love over the last twenty-five years of my life in the church are actually agnostic but don’t really know it.”
For true believers only—in atheism, that is. Students of the business of religion will find only occasional pearls.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-306-82224-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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
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