“Sin boldly,” Luther proclaimed. The only flaw in this bold interpretation, and one by design, is that it is too short. A...
A noted Lutheran historian turns to the founder of his faith, delivering a thoughtful portrait of a complex, controversial figure.
“I will begin with Luther’s birth and end his story at his death, largely leaving to others the accounts of his posthumous influence and its global consequences,” writes Marty (Politics, Religion, and the Common Good, 2000, etc.). So he does, and if he goes lightly on the revolutions and wars that Luther (1483–1546) touched off with his radical reshaping of the church, Marty gives a careful accounting of the man. One constant in Luther’s life seems to have been a rather dark view of humankind, and perhaps even of God: his parents were harsh disciplinarians; his schoolteachers assured him and his classmates that “Jesus the Son of God would judge them after their death,” and “in school Luther lived in terror of the ‘wolf,’ the classmate charged to tattle weekly on the children and finger them as candidates for physical punishment”; the young Catholic monk Luther and his mentor, Vicar General Johannes von Staupitz, “inhabited a universe in which they thought a threatening God kept a suspicious eye on every human act.” Whence, perhaps, Luther’s keen interest in hellfire and damnation, and with the problem of Everyman’s working out his own salvation—and without the vehicle of priestly indulgence, which allowed the well-off to “become complacent about their situation before God. They would feel that they could sin and not fear purgatorial punishment.” Marty portrays Luther as both conservative and radical, as torn by doubts and pained by illness—yet resolute in his devotion to ecclesiastical reform and his belief that the personal search for salvation was far more important than the “papal and imperial threats” he faced over most of his theological career. Throughout, Marty does not shy from unpleasant questions, notably Luther’s anti-Semitism; nor does he fail to point out inconsistencies and paradoxes in the Lutheran legacy.
“Sin boldly,” Luther proclaimed. The only flaw in this bold interpretation, and one by design, is that it is too short. A fine brief on a world-changing figure.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03272-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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