Intimate insights from one of America’s most prolific presidential authors.
A highly personal reflection on faith—in God, in humanity, and in oneself.
In his latest, Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety, 2015, etc.), well-known for his Christian beliefs and lifelong involvement in his local church, continues to investigate his faith. Though the narrative tends to ramble, the author provides ample wisdom and fascinating insights into his past. While mostly about the divine, faith, he writes, touches on other aspects of life as well: “There is another kind of faith, perhaps more difficult to sustain: having a firm belief in yourself and in other people, or in a seemingly impossible dream.” He stresses the importance of having faith in our neighbor and, when warranted, in government. Nevertheless, it is religious faith to which the former president most often refers, and in the book’s most meaningful passages, he explores the story of his own struggles with faith and with doubt. While he was in the Navy, immersed in the new science of nuclear energy, Carter turned to the writings of liberal contemporary theologians such as Rudolf Bultmann and the Niebuhr brothers to reconcile his traditional Christian background with the modern world in which he was living and working. Carter’s father’s death, election losses, and his own struggle with cancer all further shaped his faith. “To me, ‘faith’ is not just a noun but also a verb,” he notes, meaning that a life lived in faith brings about answers to questions and guidance along life’s path. Of course, politics feature prominently in the book, as well; throughout, the former president discusses domestic and foreign policy as he lived it and as it stands today. There are curmudgeonly moments, unfortunately, when Carter dwells on how everything in America seems to have worsened over time, but overall the tone is positive. “My faith is the key to my optimism,” he writes.
Intimate insights from one of America’s most prolific presidential authors.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-8441-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
IN THE NEWS
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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