A very human Paul, brought to life by an experienced teacher and pastor—an excellent introduction for general readers.
Wright (New Testament and Early Christianity/University of St. Andrews; The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion, 2016, etc.) draws from a lifetime of study on the figure of Paul to construct this useful biography of the early Christian missionary.
Though there is no shortage of extant material about Paul, who helped establish Christianity as a growing religion in the Mediterranean basin, the author is nevertheless able to provide a much-needed fresh voice to the body of Pauline studies. Blending solid scholarship and analysis with a respect for and, indeed, belief in the text, Wright provides a solid introduction to Paul written not for the skeptic but for the believer. He is a fluid writer whose work is accessible and engrossing. Throughout, Wright attempts to discover “what made Paul tick.” What he discovers is a man driven from his youth by zeal and inspired by a passion for his scriptural antecedents. Once confronted with the new reality of Jesus Christ, revealed to him in a vision on the road to Damascus, Paul was forced to reassess his belief system and, ultimately, his life’s course. Instead of getting bogged down in inconsistencies with Paul’s timeline, as do many scholars, Wright takes these elements in stride and looks to the realities of what Paul must have been dealing with, wherever and with whomever being of secondary importance. Paul realized that Jesus represented not a new religion but a fulfillment of his Jewish beliefs; with that understanding firmly in his mind, he set out to share it with the world. Along the way, he suffered greatly, in ways that Wright brilliantly exposes by drawing forth from the text the tapestry of anxieties, broken relationships, beatings, imprisonments, and other crises that dogged his life and ministry.
A very human Paul, brought to life by an experienced teacher and pastor—an excellent introduction for general readers.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-173058-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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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