The darkest biography yet of the irascible Luther, by Harvard professor emeritus and novelist Marius (Thomas More: A Biography, 1984, etc.). Marius claims that Luther’s profound fear of death drove him to the extremes of the Reformation—extremes that, in Marius’s view, were largely unnecessary to achieve lasting change. Marius may have overstepped the biographer’s boundaries by concluding that history without Luther would have been far much more peaceful: “for more than a century after Luther’s death, Europe was strewn with the slaughtered corpses of people who would have lived normal lives if Luther had never lived at all.” Marius places the blame for much of modern ontological uncertainty squarely on the monk’s shoulders, and also saddles him with responsibility for desacralizing communion, contributing to the decline of biblical authority, and plunging Europe into religious intolerance. These charges may be harsh, but Marius does show where Luther’s writings degenerated into virulent anti-Semitism (a topic universally glossed over by previous biographers) and superstition. Marius also surpasses other biographers in tortuously documenting the reformer’s dark side; here we see Luther as an unstable individual whose depths of despair were truly frightening. Yet Marius’s book tends too far in this direction and almost completely ignores the joy that also, paradoxically, suffused Luther’s copious writing and his personal life. Marius chooses to end Luther’s story in 1527, almost two full decades before his death, saying that the later Luther is “not as interesting” as the man who sparked the Reformation. But by neglecting the last two decades of Luther’s life Marius also ignores his transformation into a family man and, at times, a mellower creature. Marius’s book should be read in tandem with Heiko Oberman’s similarly titled Luther: Man Between God and the Devil for a more balanced portrait. Valuable for its depiction of Luther’s mad wrestling with doubt and despair, but too one-sided to capture the contradictions in its complex subject. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-55090-0
Page Count: 532
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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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