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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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