“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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 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.
