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SAINT PETER

A BIOGRAPHY

A prolific classical historian attempts to uncover the ``historical'' Peter from evidence in the New Testament. For Grant (Constantine the Great, p. 681, etc.), St. Peter is ``one of the most significant people who ever lived,'' a man who held together the original Christian community and made possible the work of Paul and the spread of Christianity throughout the world. In order to produce a strictly historical account of Peter, Grant rejects as unreliable whatever he considers to be a religious or typological metaphor in the New Testament. Furthermore, he harks back to 1920s German biblical scholar Rudolf Bultmann with a blanket, a priori assumption that miraculous and supernatural events did not really happen, although their moral or pietistic ``meaning'' is true. Thus, the story of Peter walking on the water toward Jesus is merely a pre-scientific way of stating that one should focus on Jesus amidst life's uncertainties. This reductionist approach leads to a text that is a patchwork of probabilities, with the author rather unscientifically begging his own questions and determining what is the ``more likely'' course of events. In Grant's scenario, Peter emerges as a fairly well-off fish pickler, impulsive but slow in understanding, whose faith led Jesus to appoint him first among the apostles and foundation stone of the new movement. Grant accepts as likely the tradition that Peter was crucified and buried in Rome, although he brings in little evidence from recent Vatican excavations. Occasionally, he drops his pose of scholarly detachment, as when he explains that the apostles left everything to follow Jesus because they were too lazy to work, or when he dismisses the resurrection of Christ as a highly motivating delusion. Copious footnotes and a bibliography provide useful tools for further study. A mostly derivative work in which the author's insights are limited by a naive positivism. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club alternate selections; History Book Club main selection)

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995

ISBN: 0-684-19354-X

Page Count: 224

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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