by Maribeth Vander Weele ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2018
A brief but captivating look at an ancient story.
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A revisionist interpretation of the biblical book of Job that raises provocative questions about its titular protagonist’s character.
The widely accepted reading of Job is that God allowed him to suffer at the hands of Satan despite his righteousness. The ostensible lessons are that even the morally blameless can suffer and that God’s plan is inscrutable. However, Vander Weele (Reclaiming Our Schools, 1994) argues that this view entails a theological incoherency, as God capriciously delivers a good man into Satan’s evil clutches. In search of an alternative explanation, the author—a professional corporate investigator—meticulously scoured the text for “throwaway lines” that function as exegetical clues. In the process, she discovered an entirely new analysis: “Perhaps Job wasn’t the loving and honorable brother, relative, friend, and civic leader he imagined himself to be.” In this book, she considers evidence that Job’s prideful estimation of his own virtue far exceeded reality—that after he suffered a series of catastrophic losses, his neighbors abandoned him, and his friends felt that he deserved punishment for shady business practices that preyed upon the poor. Job, the author asserts, seemed more concerned with defending his reputation, arrogantly proposing a “cosmic Calculus” in which he earned his prosperity and future salvation. Vander Weele’s thesis in this book is as challenging as it is rigorous. Her painstaking interrogation of the biblical text is delightfully unrelenting. It also provides a philosophically sound lesson involving the dangers of pride and the eternal goodness not of Job, but of God. The author also furnishes an engaging account of Satan’s role in all this and the way in which he was essentially duped by God. Throughout, her prose is unfailingly clear and free of academic jargon, and her analytical results read like a true-crime mystery: dramatic, accessible, and full of profound, moral meaning.
A brief but captivating look at an ancient story.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-7322408-1-0
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Sagerity Press, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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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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