Problematic but engaging participant observation.
Ivy League student spends three months immersed in an alien culture at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.
Instead of cavorting through the major European capitals for a semester like many students his age, Roose shocked family and friends by enrolling at one of the nation’s most conservative Christian universities. After an attempt to interact honestly with his fundamentalist peers was met with awkward silence and resistance, Roose decided to go undercover, pretending to be a recently converted evangelical Christian in order to write about the reality of life on campus. To improve the ruse, he added his voice to the 300-strong Thomas Road Baptist Church choir, joined weekly Bible studies and one-on-one prayer sessions with his dorm buddies, and even traveled to Daytona Beach during spring break to evangelize on the frontlines. Reared in a liberal Quaker home, Roose had to develop a new body of knowledge, from Young Earth creationism to the trials and triumphs of “witnessing” for Jesus. Participation in this hyper-religious community of young people led him to identify more with his friends at Liberty, blurring the line between the writing project and his own faith. Therein lay the danger of his experiment: Roose lost much of his objectivity by drawing too close to the group he studied. Throughout the semester, he noted the progress of the transformation, but he chose to dwell on its positive aspects, such as an increasing sense of connection to God and the cherished realization that not all fundamentalist Christians are hate-mongering hypocrites. The climax of his semester was his interview of Falwell just days before his death. The author’s complex emotions about the interview and Falwell’s death signaled that, like it or not, his semester at Liberty had altered Roose’s way of thinking—though perhaps not permanently, as he was still a teenager at the time and would soon return to the über-liberal embrace of Brown University.
Problematic but engaging participant observation.Pub Date: March 26, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-17842-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
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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