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HOPE AFTER FAITH

AN EX-PASTOR'S JOURNEY FROM BELIEF TO ATHEISM

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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