More complete but less evenhanded than Robert Remini’s Joseph Smith (2002); some readers may find parts of Bushman’s...
Orthodox life of the decidedly unorthodox Joseph Smith, founder and prophet of Mormonism.
Bushman (History emeritus/Columbia Univ.; The Refinement of America, 1992) describes himself as “a believing historian”—a believing Mormon, that is, as well as a professional historian in the tradition of Leonard Arrington and other Mormon scholars. He is concerned, he continues, with depicting a real Joseph Smith, not a flawless or idealized one, no easy task given both church doctrine and the lack of documentation that is without bias one way or another. The facts are these, and not much at issue: Smith grew up in a region of upstate New York known in the post-revolutionary era as a breeding ground for religious movements of various kinds, in a family that was poor but by all accounts happy. The interpretation begins almost immediately, for Smith became known to the world for having reportedly received visions of an angel who led him to a book “written upon golden plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent and the source from whence they sprang.” The accept-it-or-don’t nature of the vision and the text that Smith subsequently developed has been a source of controversy since that September day in 1823. Bushman considers many of the disagreements, such as the “composition” view of the Book of Mormon, with Smith as literal author, versus the “transcription” view, by which Smith dictated divinely revealed text to a secretary. Believers hold to the latter view, for, Bushman writes, “the composition theory calls for a precocious genius of extraordinary powers who was voraciously consuming information without anyone knowing it.” Bushman goes on to consider other controversies surrounding Smith’s short life, from breakaway followers to Smith’s imperial ambitions to the motives for his assassination at the age of 38.
More complete but less evenhanded than Robert Remini’s Joseph Smith (2002); some readers may find parts of Bushman’s narrative to be overly credulous.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4270-4
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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
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