Controversial, and a quick, enjoyable read. Gura will grab at least some of the audience of armchair-history-lovers that...
A gauntlet-throwing biography of the 18th-century minister and theologian who’s in the pantheon of great American intellectuals, along with Thomas Jefferson, W.E.B. DuBois, and the James brothers.
Gura (American/Religious Studies/Univ. of North Carolina; A Glimpse of Sion’s Glory, 1983, etc.) re-creates Edwards’s life and times, taking us from his birth and early studies at Yale College (not much is known about the intervening years) through his career as revivalist and theologian, and to his final post as Princeton’s third president. The third through fifth chapters form the heart of the book, where Gura argues that what animated Edwards’s preaching was an articulation of grace never before laid out in colonial America (though he notes that Edwards’s grandfather, the controversial and influential minister Samuel Stoddard, hinted at this in his own theology). It’s this grace—this “new, simple” presentation of the Gospel—that drew so many to convert after hearing Edwards, and it’s this grace that explains the biographer’s subtitle: In Gura’s reading, Edwards’s grace-filled preaching was the beginning of the great tradition of American evangelicalism. This assertion is sure to spark debate among scholars: the claim that Edwards was an evangelical is no mere semantic move, but a challenge to the theological categories that many historians have long made conventional in the history of American Protestantism. Gura’s study, too, will invite inevitable comparison with George Marsden’s biography of Edwards, which won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in 2004. Marsden is, no doubt, the standard-bearer, and even Gura acknowledges that Marsden’s is “the definitive life,” saying that his own study is not exactly a biography but a “consideration of Edwards,” a “selective” meditation on certain themes in the life. Gura will win readers, too, though, with a work that’s much the shorter, and a forceful argument that’s clear, accessible and arresting.
Controversial, and a quick, enjoyable read. Gura will grab at least some of the audience of armchair-history-lovers that professional historians always claim they want to reach.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8090-3031-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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