A straightforward biography that thankfully avoids preaching. Readers curious about Judas’ broad effect on world history...
A biography of one of the most reviled men in history, a perpetual scapegoat representing the deepest root of anti-Semitism and, in medieval times, usury.
Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph senior features writer Stanford (Catholicism: A Complete Introduction, 2015, etc.) sees Judas at the heart of the embattled early church. The Pauline believers thought Christianity was a new religion altogether, led by St. Paul’s writings. Then there were those who felt this doctrine was a new part of the Jewish religion. The latter was reawakened with the 2006 National Geographic film revealing the Gospel of Judas. This gospel was written in Greek at the end of the second century long after the synoptic and more historically reliable Gospels of Matthew, Luke, Mark, and John. Judas’ gospel was written about Jesus as seen by him in the last three days of his life, adding nothing to detail or defend Judas’ life. While the author does not give many details of the gospel, Jesus comes across as more human than divine. He is short-tempered and generally disagreeable, and he mocks his inner circle and dismisses the Eucharist. In the late fourth century, Pauline orthodoxy really began to grow, and the beliefs and texts of the Gnostics and Judas were dismissed and destroyed. The author argues that the Gospels should be taken seriously, but not literally, accepting Judas as a true figure rather than a manufactured scapegoat. He sees the Judas of the four Gospels as too inconsistent, too human, and too unpredictable to be a mere device. There are still those who wonder whether Judas was doomed or damned. Was he truly a money-grabbing traitor, or was he part of the entire divine plan?
A straightforward biography that thankfully avoids preaching. Readers curious about Judas’ broad effect on world history will welcome this book.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-61902-709-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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