More useful to would-be pastors than to general readers, but a worthy addition to the literature.
A preacher’s notes on matters of the heart and spirit.
Lischer (Divinity/Duke Univ.; The Preacher King, 1995) candidly admits that after his stellar performance at a Lutheran seminary, where he excelled in the arcana of ancient Greek and hermeneutics, he expected to be rewarded with “a distinguished career . . . a cutting-edge pastoral appointment in a socially conscious but not unaffluent congregation, followed by a professorship in our denomination’s flagship seminary, capped off by the presidency of the seminary and—why not?—of the whole church body.” Instead, in the early 1970s, he found himself assigned to a struggling, “unstrategic” little church in the cornfields of southern Illinois, its pews filled with beefy-handed farmers, their suspicious wives, and sullen children. He was not especially effective, he admits, at reaching his congregation with sermons full of allusions to Camus, Joyce, and Heidegger, though his charges were for the most part far too polite to tell him so. (A few, however, were openly contemptuous, and they make an interesting, rowdy chorus throughout the book.) Pastoring, preaching, and counseling through the years of Vietnam, Watergate, open marriage, and drugs, Lischer struggled to meet his congregation’s needs and to batten down his pride, which “weighted me down from my very first sighting of the church, impeded all my relationships with my parishioners, and never let me run with joy the race I might have run.” In the end, he came close to succeeding, though his next congregation (suburbanites and not farmers) benefited most from the lessons he learned. Lischer occasionally steals a note from Garrison Keillor (“Among Lutherans, ecstasy may take the form of a slight twitch of the eyebrow or the pursing of lips in order to suppress a smile”) but in general the voice is his own, and his storytelling is quite effective.
More useful to would-be pastors than to general readers, but a worthy addition to the literature.Pub Date: May 15, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-50217-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
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 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
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