by Steven L. McKenzie ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000
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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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