Skees weaves together a popular history of Shakerism with an account of her month-long visit to Sabbathday Lake in Maine, the last living community of Shaker sisters and brethren. Skees, a journalist who writes on women’s spirituality, studied comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School—a kindly, open-minded institution whose intersecting currents of academic study, pastoral training, and spiritual probing amply prepared the author for her work. The chapters are structured around themes central to Shaker life—including celibacy, God, communion with spirits, relation with the outside world, prospects for survival—and based on both research in the community’s library and conversations with its eight permanent residents. Skees contrasts the intensities of Shakers past with the wise mellowness of Sabbathday’s current members. There are instructive sections on Shaker dance, music, and ritual observance. Perhaps from a wish for heightened contrast, Skees presents herself, a married woman with three sons, as too grounded in worldliness and sex (“I loved men with abandon”) ever to take up the Shaker path. But the authorial persona, which tends toward exaggeration and sentimentality, intrudes on the discussion. “Lusty phalluses and looming egos” do not, pace Ms. Skees, define men of the world. Card cataloging, a task that the librarian, Sister June, performs, is not an “ancient process.” And people today do not use words like “verily” and “elsetimes,” as the author quaintly insists on doing occasionally in her own speech. Skees’s surprise over the outward ordinariness of deeply religious people, and over the loss of self that sometimes occurs there, seems disingenuous—what else, after all, had she been learning at Harvard Divinity School? The Shaker voices communicate over the author’s annoying obtrusiveness so that despite herself her work fills a gap in the growing genre of reportage on the inner life of modern religious communities.
Pub Date: March 20, 1998
ISBN: 0-7868-6237-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.
A compendium of charts, time lines, lists and illustrations to accompany study of the Bible.
This visually appealing resource provides a wide array of illustrative and textually concise references, beginning with three sets of charts covering the Bible as a whole, the Old Testament and the New Testament. These charts cover such topics as biblical weights and measures, feasts and holidays and the 12 disciples. Most of the charts use a variety of illustrative techniques to convey lessons and provide visual interest. A worthwhile example is “How We Got the Bible,” which provides a time line of translation history, comparisons of canons among faiths and portraits of important figures in biblical translation, such as Jerome and John Wycliffe. The book then presents a section of maps, followed by diagrams to conceptualize such structures as Noah’s Ark and Solomon’s Temple. Finally, a section on Christianity, cults and other religions describes key aspects of history and doctrine for certain Christian sects and other faith traditions. Overall, the authors take a traditionalist, conservative approach. For instance, they list Moses as the author of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) without making mention of claims to the contrary. When comparing various Christian sects and world religions, the emphasis is on doctrine and orthodox theology. Some chapters, however, may not completely align with the needs of Catholic and Orthodox churches. But the authors’ leanings are muted enough and do not detract from the work’s usefulness. As a resource, it’s well organized, inviting and visually stimulating. Even the most seasoned reader will learn something while browsing.
Worthwhile reference stuffed with facts and illustrations.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 978-1-5963-6022-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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