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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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