Scripture and science meet in a pop-archaeological text; Scripture prevails.
The story of the author’s claim to have found long-lost Sodom, the world’s most wicked city.
Following the path of Abraham, Lot and Lot’s unfortunate wife, as directed primarily by Genesis, Collins (Dean of the College of Archaeology and Biblical History/Trinity Southwest Univ.; The Defendable Faith: Lessons in Christian Apologetics, 2008, etc.) places the ancient, prototypical sin city on the eastern side of the geographic flatland surrounding the Jordan River before it feeds into the Dead Sea. As those who have read the Bible know, the Sodomites, evil in charitable and financial matters as well as more lewd practices, were obliterated by a celestial catastrophe. Writing with the assistance of co-author Scott (Latter-Day Cipher, 2009, etc.), biblical archaeology maven Collins fixes the event in the Middle Bronze Age at a site in today’s Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan called Tall el-Hammam, where he and his crew have been digging for years. There, well north of the spot unfortunate Sodom has been located by others, they discovered the foundation walls of a considerable city and some peculiar artifacts. Moreover, there appears to have been no evidence of life for an intervening 700 years. There was not much else, but it was enough to convince Collins that a cosmic event was visited there four millennia ago, just where awestruck Abraham could have seen it. If only on the strength of Collins’ personal conviction that he’s found the right place with the right date, architecture and artifacts, many readers may be convinced, too. Others may want to wait for more. Collins punctuates the impassioned narrative with overly novelistic “backstories” mostly depicting “Dr. C.” (an appellation he seems to enjoy) in a kind of Indiana Jones mode.
Scripture and science meet in a pop-archaeological text; Scripture prevails.Pub Date: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1451684308
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Howard Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
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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