An engaging, enlightening study of the historical effects of one galvanizing personality.
A substantial new look at the life of Martin Luther (1483-1546), published to coincide with the 500-year anniversary of his revolutionary theses.
Refreshingly, Roper (Modern History/Univ. of Oxford; Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, 2004, etc.) does not take for granted any of the received wisdom from previous scholars regarding the life of this fearless, self-styled prophet. There are numerous biographies of Luther, a fact the author acknowledges in the introduction, but she finds that the long closure of Eastern Germany to scholarship has skewed the interpretation of Lutheranism by emphasizing the Reformation activity in the cities of the south rather than in Luther’s “home social and cultural context,” namely Wittenberg and environs, in Saxony-Anhalt. For example, Roper shows how Luther’s vision narrowed after his release from the Castle of Wartburg, and he attempted to reign in the speeding reforms he put into play while the genie of his revolutionary ideas, so to speak, was out of the bottle. The author examines his close influences and friendships, neglected elsewhere, such as with Andreas Karlstadt (and with many others he fell out with), and his artistic collaboration with Lucas Cranach the Elder, an official painter of Wittenberg who essentially molded the reformer’s public image in his published works. Roper emphasizes how novel, even feminist, his ideas were about marriage and sex, as he had to act as essentially a matchmaker for the nuns who were leaving the convents in response to Reformation ideas. These included the mature, strong-willed Katharina von Bora, who became Luther’s wife and the mother of their children. Roper also shows how uncompromising Luther could be—e.g., in rejecting the humanism of Erasmus; excoriating the peasants who rose up for better treatment during the War of the Peasants of 1524-25; and espousing vehement anti-Semitism.
An engaging, enlightening study of the historical effects of one galvanizing personality.Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9619-7
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
