Atheists and devout worshipers alike may never accept the agnostics’ philosophy. But even in defense of simply not knowing,...
A seasoned reporter on religion and an old hand on the Middle East beat, Hazleton (The First Muslim: The Story of Muhammad, 2013, etc.) is Jewish by blood and convent-educated by nuns. After more than a decade in Jerusalem, she finds that accepted pious practice is not for her.
For the author, doubt is not a problem but a blessing. She does not seek assurance of an all-encompassing intelligent design but, rather, revels in the prospects that just might yet be discovered by mankind. For this agnostic, there is delight in mystery. Her faith is in not knowing everything. Humanity, certainly, is subject to misadventure, yet it is for humans to determine what is truly significant. Meaning, in her book, is not the responsibility of a force beyond us; how we behave is our choice and our obligation. The old aphorism is clear to Hazleton: man created God, not the other way around, and she sees Him (who is consistently male) as an anthropomorphic metaphor for something bigger. “If there is one thing that can really be said with any certainty about God,” she writes, “it is that the name is utterly insufficient to the concept.” Throughout the book, the author dissects the manifestations of religious devotion. Religious belief is seen as binary, a true-or-false proposition. Where, she asks, is the nuance? Is our universe unique or only one in a greater cosmos? How can we comprehend what is beyond infinity? The agnostic mind finds no satisfactory answers in canonical tracts or fundamentalist piety. There’s no need to reckon with evil, infidels, or visiting angels. Here, with clever elucidation, are artful essays that celebrate the wonder of the unknown.
Atheists and devout worshipers alike may never accept the agnostics’ philosophy. But even in defense of simply not knowing, Hazleton does not deny possibilities; she denies only assured and implacable dogma.Pub Date: April 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59463-413-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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