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
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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