Swift-moving and engaging.
An open-minded minister tells of years spent battling the fundamentalist ringleader.
It wasn’t Killinger’s intention to provoke Jerry Falwell, but as he learned more about the televangelist’s specious theology and practices, he couldn’t help it. In 1980, faced with a brand-new congregation in an unfamiliar small town, the fledgling Presbyterian pastor with several prestigious degrees found himself curious about the dynasty down the road. Over the years, as Falwell became an increasingly powerful political influence over the Republican Party via the Moral Majority, he enabled Killinger to see his own theological purpose more clearly by contrast. Falwell’s faithful, whether at Thomas Road Baptist Church, Liberty University or glued to their TV sets, eagerly lapped up his mixture of judgment, paranoia and the promise of earthly reward for good deeds—all antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, Killinger argued. Encountering such dangerous doctrines on a daily basis helped the author formulate his own theology more soundly and preach it more enthusiastically. Though he never called Falwell by name in these sermons, word of his criticism traveled quickly. Killinger and his family received threats of physical harm, hate mail, suspicious surveillance and audits by the IRS for several consecutive years. None of those tribulations were directly traceable to Falwell himself, though the author clearly suspects he was involved. Through it all, Killinger tried to be friendly, even inviting Falwell and wife Macel into his home. Their alliance was tenuous at best, however. Years after the author had left Lynchburg and was teaching at a Christian university in Alabama, Falwell held enough of a grudge to influence the divinity school dean against him. Killinger relates these difficult years with honesty and a light, witty touch; his fluid narrative doesn’t linger on heavy religious issues, nor does it become preachy. Though he spares none of Falwell’s many flaws, he also marvels at the way this evangelical leader forever changed Christianity in America and acknowledges that he was “a strong, fascinating individual.”
Swift-moving and engaging.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-312-53858-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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