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admiring biography of a man they call “a Renaissance thinker,” quoting extensively from Berry’s prolific writings and unpublished memoirs.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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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