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
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
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