An accessible introduction to the study of world religions.
This slim debut volume offers brief, easy-to-digest summaries of major religious belief systems.
Guiteau asserts that one question has perplexed humans since the dawn of time: “[W]hy are we here, who put us here and what happens next?” In short but sweeping chapters, he outlines the basic worldviews of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism. Guiteau’s prose is clear and simple, and his book assumes no knowledge of the subjects, as if it were a primer offering students their first glimpses into the study of world religions. “God appeared to a man named Abram,” he writes in the chapter on Judaism, going on to explain how Abram’s descendants spent many years in the “Promised Land,” but were later enslaved in Egypt before God intervened. In his chapter on Christianity, Guiteau focuses on Jesus’ adult ministry, and how he emphasized love and compassion. The author focuses on the religions’ commonalities, noting, for instance, that Islam’s Prophet Muhammad, like Jesus, had few followers at the beginning of his ministry and suffered ridicule. Of Hinduism, Guiteau notes that the Swami Vivekananda quoted from the New Testament’s book of Matthew: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.” Although it’s admirable that the author is determined to present such a concise view of world religions, this strategy occasionally provides challenges, as when he writes vaguely of Taoism: “Dao (the way) is difficult to explain in words. It is beyond human comprehension.” The book is largely objective in tone, although a chapter on Islam cautions readers against painting all Muslims as terrorists in the wake of 9/11—a warning that such an evenhanded work doesn’t really need. Overall, however, Guiteau succeeds in hitting the highlights of the major faiths, and his book is a good starting point for those wanting to learn more about what unites and separates them.
An accessible introduction to the study of world religions.Pub Date: June 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-1478731696
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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