A clear window into Afro-American history, tying together many strands of black culture via the remarkable life of evangelist Father Divine; by Watts (History/Cal. State). Born George Baker in 1879 in the Monkey Run ghetto of Rockville, Maryland, Father Divine became a celebrity preacher of the early/mid-20th century, with missions across the country and a following of hundreds of thousands, whom he fed as well as taught- -for feasting and prayer (and celibacy) came together in his brand of Christianity. The plain but well-detailed description here of post-bellum black life in relatively enlightened Maryland presents an existence so brutal and limited that Father Divine's (or anyone's) successful emergence from it seems a miracle. From Monkey Run, the future preacher moved to Baltimore's Pigtown, and then somehow to L.A., where he joined a storefront church group and learned about speaking in tongues. By the mid-20's, Father Divine was a power in Harlem, with a home and following on Long Island- -where, according to Watts, as his group grew ever-larger he experienced prejudice and legal persecution. Father Divine preached a homespun, antiunion, ``do it yourself'' work ethic with a core of gentle humility and love that manifested itself in the bountiful meals he placed before followers: Before the government could organize welfare in the 30's, he was feeding the poor. No one ever found out where the money came from, but the preacher's indifference to color brought him white followers in high places (one of whom sorely damaged him by seducing a young girl in the movement). The outbreak of WW II ended Father Divine's most potent period, but he was important enough to be consulted by (and to reject) the sinister Rev. Jim Jones in the 60's. In these sympathetic, quiet pages, Father Divine emerges as a significant figure of the Harlem Renaissance: a hard-working humanitarian and man of God.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-520-07455-6
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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