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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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