An illuminating biography, though Winters is often too forgiving of Falwell’s trespasses.
A sympathetic biography of the man who, for good or ill, became "the face of Christianity to millions of Americans" in the 1980s.
A successful pastor and pioneering televangelist who built his Thomas Road Baptist Church from 36 members to a megachurch of thousands, Jerry Falwell (1933–2007) was distressed that as America descended into what he considered moral anarchy, Christianity was represented in the political arena primarily by complicit liberal clergy. He saw government oppression in Supreme Court rulings and IRS policies, and he rallied conservatives to a defense of their values with "a fighting faith, a muscular Christianity ready to do battle, not reach an accommodation, with the forces of secularization at work in the mainstream culture." Winters (Left at the Altar: How the Democrats Lost the Catholics and How the Catholics Can Save the Democrats, 2008, etc.) effectively describes the worldview of a fundamentalist Baptist pastor that informed all of Falwell’s actions. He did not fully comprehend the pluralistic values of the society he wanted to reform, or the difficulties of promoting a morality grounded in religion within the politics of a secular culture. He was capable of forming lasting personal friendships with such opposing figures as Ted Kennedy and Larry Flynt, and yet his goals and intolerant rhetoric were often deeply hurtful and offensive to millions; as Flynt put it to him, "You don’t need to poison the whole lake with your venom." Winters focuses primarily on Falwell’s political activities as a leader of the Moral Majority; an account of his parallel career as a pastor must await a more comprehensive biography. The author presents a thorough if indulgent account of Falwell’s rise to national prominence, including the temptations, conundrums and missteps that befell him as his deepening involvement in politics drew him far afield from the biblical roots of his thinking. Falwell achieved few of the Moral Majority’s goals, but he reshaped the Republican Party and national politics.
An illuminating biography, though Winters is often too forgiving of Falwell’s trespasses.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-197067-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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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