An impressive, powerful intellectual history.
A riveting dual biography reveals the social, political, and religious tensions roiling 16th-century Europe.
Massing (Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq, 2004, etc.), a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review and recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, focuses on the well-known rivalry between the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1467-1536) and the German reformer Martin Luther (1483-1546) to create a majestic, deeply informed portrait of their tempestuous times. Both men were revolutionaries, rebelling against the ethical and theological assumptions of the medieval world and the hierarchical, dissolute Catholic Church; each sought an authentic spiritual path to enlightenment and salvation. For Erasmus, performing “works of an ethical nature” was central to being “a pious Christian.” For Luther, good works were “not just useless but dangerous—a self-seeking expression that imparted a false sense of security.” Although both became monks, Erasmus was cosmopolitan and gregarious; Luther, provincial, harsh, and viciously anti-Semitic. Erasmus appealed “to reason, free will, and moral virtue”; Luther thundered that faith alone led to redemption. In their prolific writings, which gained wide readership from the burgeoning printing industry, they railed against rampant “papal, curial, and ecclesiastical excesses.” Both offered their own translations of the Bible, accessible to common readers, an affront to clerical authority that incited the church’s wrath. Luther went farther than Erasmus by condemning the church for collecting fees for performing rites, insisting on celibacy among the clergy, and selling indulgences. Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, made public in 1517 as the 95 theses, catapulted Luther to sudden fame—and also led to virulent attacks that dogged his life: his books were burned, and he was summoned to recant before judges at Worms. His “unflinching stand,” Thomas Carlyle later wrote, “was the greatest moment in the Modern History of Men,” setting the stage for English Puritanism, parliamentary government, the French Revolution, and modernity. Massing argues persuasively that the discordant views represented by the two men continue to shape Western culture.
An impressive, powerful intellectual history.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-051760-1
Page Count: 960
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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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