Typically capable and lucid: Remini’s analysis is sure to excite controversy among those who view Smith in a different light.
Brief but edifying account of the life of the troubled prophet who founded the Mormon Church.
Remini (John Quincy Adams, 2002, etc.) is not a Mormon, wisely situating his life of Joseph Smith largely outside the realm of theology. He concentrates instead on the cultural and social milieu of the Jacksonian era, a time he knows as well as any historian working today. Remini locates Smith’s remarkable achievements as a religious leader given to visions and, apparently, angelic visitations in the climate of millenarian and communitarian experimentation that reigned in the American countryside during the time of the so-called Second Great Awakening, an evangelical storm whose “explosive force swept with such scalding ferocity through western New York”—where Smith lived for most of his short life—“that the region came to be known as the ‘Burned-Over District.’ ” Smith’s particular view mixed elements of Christianity with a hopeful addendum to the tale of the Passion, in which the resurrected Christ abandoned the Holy Land and spent the next 200 years preaching to the Nephites, a lost tribe of Israel that had relocated to America. This view was not popular with many of Smith’s neighbors, and he and his early followers endured persecution, armed attacks, and death threats as they slowly traveled westward to the banks of the Mississippi; Smith would eventually be assassinated, leaving it to his lieutenant, Brigham Young, to carry on his work. Remini explores just what it was about Smith’s ideas that inspired such hatred among the nonbelievers—the identification of Mormonism with abolitionism and the early church’s efforts to convert American Indians had something to do with it—and just what it was about those ideas that enabled his religion to grow from a handful of followers in the 1830s to many millions today.
Typically capable and lucid: Remini’s analysis is sure to excite controversy among those who view Smith in a different light.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03083-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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 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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