Fresh, insightfully written investigation of how colonial Puritanism’s core beliefs and ragged edges produced its most...
The life and turbulent times of the only judge fully to recant the actions of a court that sent 19 accused witches to the gallows in colonial Massachusetts.
Since the copious diary of Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), spanning nearly 57 years, is a principal source of material regarding the motives and reasoning of those who convened the notorious Witch Trials in 1692, it has been well perused prior to being taken up by biographer, novelist and historian Francis (Creative Writing/Bath Spa Univ.; Prospect Hill, 2004, etc.). Yet his is both a sensitive and scholarly rendering, with far-reaching perspectives that bring Sewall off the page as he confronts both the material and spiritual worlds of his time. Francis ferrets out his subject’s anxieties, obsessions and anathemas (he was consoled in good measure though not entirely by the rigidly elaborate tenets of his Puritan faith) to conclude: “He was confident for much of the time but could be gauche and awkward too,” and though he was devout, he “loved the good things in life, especially music, food and drink.” While Sewall often stood unflinchingly in liberal opposition to clerics and leaders on such issues as the treatment of Indians (he favored fairness, education and conversion) and the rights of women, he also courted the in crowd and felt stress whenever his approaches seemed rebuffed. Tapped as a judge in the infamous proceedings that brought down death sentences on the basis of “spectral evidence,” his popularity and influence fed into the key decisions on the bench with no hint at how soon they would become onerous. Five years later, his uniquely unqualified apology was read to a congregation commemorating the victims of Salem’s trials. “Somehow, by the end of his life,” Francis asserts, “the former witchcraft judge had made himself a recognizably modern man.”
Fresh, insightfully written investigation of how colonial Puritanism’s core beliefs and ragged edges produced its most ungodly legacy.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2005
ISBN: 0-00-716362-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
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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