A warm celebration of an environmentalist whose ideas are increasingly relevant.
A biography of a self-described “geologian” who worked to deepen humanity’s connection to nature.
Priest, historian, and environmentalist, Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was an inspiring teacher and writer whose most influential works focused on cosmology and ecology. Tucker and Grim (Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology, 2016), both Berry’s former students, remained closely involved with their esteemed teacher, editing his essays for publication; promoting his legacy; and serving as his literary executors. Along with Angyal (Emeritus, English and Environmental Studies, Elon Univ.; Wendell Berry, 1995, etc.), they offer an admiring biography of a man they call “a Renaissance thinker,” quoting extensively from Berry’s prolific writings and unpublished memoirs. Educated in Catholic schools, Berry felt drawn to a priestly vocation. Religion, he said, exerted on him the call of the wild: “the meaning and symbolisms of the various natural phenomena, the manner in which the transition moments in the daily and yearly cycles of nature were sacred moments.” The order of the Passionists attracted him especially because he hoped to be sent to their missions in China. Although his stay in China was cut short by the Maoist revolution, it inspired a lifelong interest in Asian religions, which he incorporated into his studies and teaching. In the History of Religions graduate program at Fordham University, which he initiated, he also taught classes on American Indian religions and on the meaning of symbols, based on the work of Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung. Influenced by the religious philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, in 1970, Berry established the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, where, he wrote, “Human-Earth relations became the central issue” of study. Throughout his life, the authors assert, “the allure of the cosmos penetrated his psyche.” He called for a merging of science and the humanities and advocated for the creation of Earth Jurisprudence to address “the devastating impact of industrial culture on the survival of the planet.”
A warm celebration of an environmentalist whose ideas are increasingly relevant.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-231-17698-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Columbia Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
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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