work in the conspiracy school of Biblical criticism.
A strenuously speculative biography of a cherished Biblical figure, equated here to Saddam Hussein.
Bible scholar McKenzie (The Hebrew Bible Today, not reviewed) attacks King David with a vehemence worthy of St. Paul—after his vision on the road to Damascus. He gleefully points out David’s recorded and fictional stains, as if the Bible were not already long-established as a clothesline of dirty laundry pinned up for moral lessons in personal responsibility and divine karma. McKenzie refuses to consider David's sexual misconduct, unplanned self-incrimination, loss of sons, courageous admission of guilt, and ascent to the throne as simply the second bookend of the Judah epic of Genesis. On the contrary, after deeming David historical enough to malign, McKenzie uses a “Deuteronomistic History” theory to date a hodgepodge writing of the David saga centuries later than previously supposed for political reasons of his own. Among the accusations McKenzie levies against the psalmist-king are these: he was a soldier, his failed coup earned Saul's enmity, his outlaws plundered and annihilated Judean villages, he “murdered Nabal and seized his wife, Abigail, and his property,” he was responsible for King Saul's death, and he iced a dozen other political threats. Much of the guilt behind these assertions is thoroughly circumstantial and based upon McKenzie’s estimations of what David stood to gain from such enormities. David is called a mafioso, a terrorist, and worse, while positive Biblical depictions are deemed “unlikely.” To McKenzie, the ark is “a northern artifact” and the northern tribes were “a conquered people.” After 18 pages of notes there is a bibliography of over 340 works by other secular scholars not known for empathy or familiarity with ancient Semitic religious texts. McKenzie might well place David on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963. He should be credited for providing an imaginative
work in the conspiracy school of Biblical criticism.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-19-513273-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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