by John Killinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2009
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
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
National Book Award Winner
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.