An accessible primer to Islamic ideology for the uninitiated.
A meticulous, scholarly introduction to Islamic literalism, specifically designed for a Western readership.
Butta’s (The Jewish People and Jesus, 2010) latest effort attempts to provide a “one-stop introduction for people who want to know more about Islamic literalism.” Literalists, he writes, fundamentally interpret the Quran as an authoritative guide for all human affairs; some even adhere to a dangerous, politicized version of Islam. The book is intended specifically for curious Westerners who have little knowledge about Islamic studies. To this end, the author strives to present his study in an easy-to-understand style. He examines sections of Quranic text in chronological order, and this innovation alone makes the Quran considerably more accessible. For each section, Butta selects a key text, analyzes it from a theological and historical perspective, and then offers an illuminating “Western analysis,” which considers how each teaching guides Islamic literalists’ interaction with the Western world. For example, one startling account addresses how Islamic antipathy to non-Muslims may be rooted in the belief that “Allah left non-Muslims in error and led them astray so non-Muslims might feel terror and fear.” The prose is always lucid, and the scholarly analysis, though painstaking, is genuinely easy to follow. Butta often makes clear his own misgivings about fundamentalist Islam (“One must wonder if Muslim women would still choose Muhammad over Jesus of the New Testament if they could read the New Testament and make up their mind without fear of being beaten or killed.”), and readers might have been interested in hearing more about “strictly cultural Muslims who reject Political Islam.” Nevertheless, the book’s overall presentation is reliably evenhanded and rigorous.
An accessible primer to Islamic ideology for the uninitiated.Pub Date: March 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1477295298
Page Count: 512
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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