A bizarre twist on biblical prophecy.
Mozell-Smith, who says she was told by God to write a book, shares favorite Scriptures along with some unorthodox interpretations of the Bible.
A retired school bus driver now attending university classes in Christian Studies, Mozell-Smith says her book is a prophetic update to the Bible. She has mined the Scriptures, assembling hundreds of verses on a variety of topics. Unlike most inspirational books, which indent Scriptures within the text or at least place them in quotation marks, Mozell-Smith often blends her thoughts and the Bible’s, and it can be confusing to determine where she finishes speaking and Scripture begins. Often focusing on race, she believes a number of biblical figures were black, including Jesus and Joseph, and she says Moses was the first albino. The Caucasian race, she writes, resulted from the curse of leprosy. Mozell-Smith believes in UFOs and says that because Satan lost the ability to fly, “He now relies on UFOs for transportation to and from heaven for approved visits only.” She writes that the Antichrist appeared in December 2012 but doesn’t say who that person was. However strange many of her statements may seem, Mozell-Smith appears sincere in her beliefs. She’s certainly entitled to her own opinions about Scripture, though her readers may be less accepting of her handling of scientific facts, as when she writes, “The earth do (sic) not rotate. The sun rotates around the earth.” She considers such information truth that was revealed to her. She also holds unusual beliefs on social issues and says the “gay movement” is causing the expansion of hell, noting, “God has it set on one temperature and that is burn baby burn.” She also opposes church leadership positions for women and says “woman is to man as a sheep dog is to a shepherd.” The book is riddled with grammatical errors, with Mozell-Smith often using “want” for “won’t” and incorrect verb tenses. Some chapters consist only of Scripture with no personal narrative added, which might relieve exhausted readers.
A bizarre twist on biblical prophecy.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615869148
Page Count: 314
Publisher: WAVES
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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