A spirited, highly imaginative dissection of the postponed apocalypse.
An explanatory guide to end-times prophecies that centered on the year 2012.
Scott’s (Bible Code Broken, 2009, etc.) work, first published three years ago, was apparently intended to be very topical, as it focuses on the end-of-the-world predictions that were a short-lived cultural phenomenon. Both the ancient Mayan calendar and centuries-old writings of Nostradamus seemed to prophesy that the world would come to an end in the closing months of 2012. Scott employs a wide variety of familiar eschatological dodges (mentioning early on, for instance, that some prophecies are “flexible in their fulfillment”), so readers may approach his book with a certain amount of ironic detachment. After all, the skies didn’t darken three years ago, nor did anything resembling the end-times prophecies materialize. Fortunately for the fundamentalist Christians who are Scott’s clear target audience, he’s packed so much rhetorical activity into this book that only the most skeptical readers will hold its central, overriding error against it. In a series of crisp, short sections, he takes readers through a convoluted landscape of biblical prophecy and an assortment of paranormal subjects. Many of these ideas will be familiar to readers of standard conspiracy-theory literature: that the predominance of sex in the media is the work of Satan; that clandestine political operatives are set on creating a “new world order”; and that extraterrestrials regularly visit Earth, among other notions. Scott does add some baroque twists, as when he informs readers that some of the aforementioned humanoid aliens regularly sleep with prostitutes. And although the author occasionally indulges in fringe notions (e.g., witches can control the weather), he also laces his book with gentle humor (“If you’re waiting to see the English word ‘rapture’ in any of the major [Bible] translations,” he writes at one point, “you may be waiting until…well, the rapture”). He also shares what he says is the ultimate key to surviving the end times, whenever they may be: “love.”
A spirited, highly imaginative dissection of the postponed apocalypse.Pub Date: Oct. 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-1449768409
Page Count: 362
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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