Conveys the facts, but little else.
From British politician/author Hattersley (Buster’s Diaries, 2000, etc.): a biography of Methodism’s founder regrettably lacking in the “enthusiasm” that made his evangelical sect the most dynamic faith in 18th-century England.
John Wesley (1703–91) was not alone in feeling there was something essential missing in the anemic brand of Protestantism offered by the complacent, corrupt Church of England. The Holy Club established by his younger brother Charles at Oxford, which John joined in 1729, was one of many small religious societies whose members sought a more active and committed spiritual life. Methodism (so called because the members believed in systematic exercises of piety) became a national movement because John Wesley’s emphasis on an ecstatic moment of conversion and a personal relationship with God spoke powerfully to people neglected by the established church, especially poor people. But Hattersley has little interest in the qualities that sparked tumultuous mass response when, in 1739 Wesley began reluctantly preaching in fields; he calls fellow Methodist George Whitefield a better orator and suggests Whitefield would have been a better leader. The author stresses Wesley’s constant doctrinal shifts, most of which will be incomprehensible to modern readers not versed in theological history, and his equally vacillating relationships with women to paint an unflattering portrait of a man who frequently changed his mind and then insisted he’d believed the same thing all along. This makes it difficult to appreciate Methodism’s enormous impact on English society and culture, or to have much interest in Wesley himself. Lengthy discussions of debates over Methodism’s organizational structure and its uneasy relationship with the Church of England, from which it did not officially separate until after Wesley’s death, are certainly necessary but not written in a manner likely to engage the general reader. Hattersley’s joint biography of Salvation Army founders William and Catherine Booth (Blood and Fire, 2000) did a much better job of intertwining psychological, religious, and social issues in a more compelling narrative.
Conveys the facts, but little else.Pub Date: June 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50334-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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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