A debut “spiritual memoir” recounts a man’s journey from Christian belief to a moderate atheism.
After he turned 12, Bales moved to a small town in Kansas, his early life dominated by his involvement in a Methodist church. While he was unreservedly devoted to his religious practice, even at a young age he was troubled by questions about his faith that he could not answer and by the variety of mutually exclusive claims to the true Word of God (there were eight different congregations in his town). Over time, those questions deepened into ones marked by a sense of profound philosophical urgency, and his growing skepticism erupted into a full crisis of faith while in college. There, Bales encountered philosophy, and the discipline’s incessant quest for knowledge provided a stark contrast to his experience with his church’s elders, who railed against a caricatured version of science and dogmatically foreclosed a spirit of inquiry. He not only realized that many of the philosophical arguments in support of the existence of God were, at the very least, debatable, but that there was, within the Christian tradition, a rich history of intellectual inquiry. Bales attributes the perpetuation of closed-mindedness in religion to a kind of willful insularity—it’s much easier to find solace in ossified doctrine when one avoids exposure to a diversity of opinion. The author was stirred by what he read in college but also by those he met: a wide spectrum of people with a wealth of varying experiences and beliefs. Bales not only started to change his mind, but began to alter the way he thought as well (“It began to dawn on me that not only was I being introduced to a world of new ideas and experiences, I was also hearing a new approach to dealing with competing beliefs”). The author does a marvelous job accessibly discussing complex philosophical ideas and texts. Also, he carefully distinguishes his approach from the shriller versions of atheism today, allowing for the possibility of a rational defense of faith and crediting religion with great cultural achievements (“I love much of the art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods—art created, at least ostensibly, for the glory of God”). He avoids political partisanship, drawing only limited political conclusions toward the very end of the book.
A philosophically balanced atheism presented in the form of intellectual autobiography.
Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4582-0582-7
Page Count: 296
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
