A thoughtful reflection on spirituality that’s too long and personal to attract much attention beyond the author’s circles.
Inspired by the example of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Hart kept a journal of daily spiritual exercises.
Debut author Hart’s spiritual journey was in part kindled by a series of brushes with his mortality. A decade ago, he suffered three heart attacks in three months, an experience that concluded with triple bypass surgery. Later, he discovered a book that resonated with him—The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola—a 16th-century “instruction manual for spiritual discovery.” In 2011, the author followed the daily program prescribed by the book, and he repeated the experience starting in 2016. This book is essentially a record of those efforts, a personal memoir that chronicles a self-governed spiritual retreat. The exercises break in four parts, or “Ignatian weeks,” which in standard calendar terms add up to 35 weeks. Each entry concentrates on a reading from the Bible, which is then used as a kind of legend with which to understand the author’s life. His reflections are broadly conceived, recounting his own experiences as a businessman and a family man. Hart meditates on the meaning of love, death, humility, and sin, to name some of the grand topics he discusses. He uses the central messages of Jesus’ ministry to make sense of his wife’s medical challenges, his depression following his ouster as CEO of a company he founded, and his early resistance to institutional religion. Hart writes clearly and with admirable candor, always quick to forthrightly discuss his own failings and foibles, making this a very human and humble remembrance. His initial misgiving about religion was borne out of the perception that it was a force for balkanizing exclusivity, and he beautifully discusses his own conversion in terms of his discovery of Jesus’ unifying message: “I pray for the strength to remain firm in my conviction that the standards of Jesus Christ are first and foremost to serve others and to love my enemies. Forgiveness and inclusion remain the two most important words in my faith.” Also, the author’s reflections neatly combine the personal and the philosophical, and he freely and astutely draws from theological luminaries like Thomas Merton, Karl Jaspers, Meister Eckhart, and Augustine. Hart lingers on his political hobbyhorses, especially his distaste for Donald Trump, which may seem out of place in a spiritually oriented work. Also, especially given the length of the memoir as a whole, it’s so idiosyncratically personal that it’s unlikely to sustain the reader’s interest to the end, at least not a reader personally unfamiliar with Hart. He provides lots of information about his family, profiles of his siblings, and at one juncture, a chart detailing his positive and negative character traits.
A thoughtful reflection on spirituality that’s too long and personal to attract much attention beyond the author’s circles.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 400
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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