by Najmus Saquib ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 3, 2012
A testament to optimism and courage, which, even if arguable, provides a record of our long fascination with God.
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A difficult-to-categorize compendium of religious commentary down through the ages.
Eclectic writer Saquib (Anondo Bedonay America, 2012) spent 13 years putting together this compilation, for which he pored over hundreds if not thousands of sources. The premise of the book is that all religions are truly one, in that we all worship the same God, and if Saquib can succeed in making that fact blindingly apparent—with over 400 pages of comparative quotations, coincidental observations and parallel trackings through millennia—then the current “clash” of civilizations may become a “friendship” of civilizations that will usher in the Peaceable Kingdom. His gleanings are from all the major religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Shintoism, Buddhism and more; even atheism gets a nod. Furthermore, the timeline goes from the first primitive sense of a deity right up to this post-9/11 world. Saquib is nothing if not helpful and inviting. Right off, he assures readers that “this book is designed to be read randomly—a page, a few quotes or a chapter at a time, to allow for contemplation.” He offers not only a preface but a detailed readers’ guide describing the organization of the book, its benefits and thumbnail summaries of each of the 14 chapters. He even suggests how neatly it could fit in as a textbook in a typical college semester. Each chapter contains a Status Update as a kind of historical preamble; Notes from History, to orient readers; a Holy Wall on which God posts; a Wall of Mortals on which humans have posted; and a Chapter Digest to summarize it all. Rarely has a reader been more solicitously shepherded. Aside from a few copy editing errors, Saquib writes well and is scrupulous about details, but readers needn’t be cynical to have doubts. For instance, the idea that humans all worship the same God has been indeterminately argued since time immemorial. Still, readers may feel abashed in the literary presence of a man who dares to hope, who’s not ashamed to look perhaps foolishly naïve in this jaded age, and who has devoted so much time and work to this labor of love that’s boundless in its optimism.
A testament to optimism and courage, which, even if arguable, provides a record of our long fascination with God.Pub Date: Dec. 3, 2012
ISBN: 978-0985823207
Page Count: 498
Publisher: Innovation and Integration, Inc.
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by John Carey ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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by Lorenzo Carcaterra ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 10, 1995
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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