A well-researched undermining of SDA belief that should stir interest and outrage in the SDA fold.
A scholarly self-help book for those who feel trapped in the Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) church, a booming Protestant denomination with roughly 15 million members worldwide.
Think Y2K was anticlimactic? Consider the year 1844, when tens of thousands of believers in prophet William Miller’s prediction that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent on October 22 witnessed that date come and go without so much as a peep from Jesus. After wonderfully capturing this frenzied historical context and end-times hysteria, the Beems introduce prophetess Ellen White, a key figure in the founding of the SDA church in 1863 and an eccentric visionary who believed that Miller wasn’t necessarily wrong in his end-times calculations, he just didn’t realize that Jesus was starting His judgment in heaven instead of on earth. Nice spin. The authors pick apart White’s life and writings to destabilize the historical, scriptural and doctrinal pillars of the SDA organization. Exposure to mercury vapors and a violent head injury as a schoolgirl, for instance, are posited as possible causes of White’s visions. And White’s recommended diet, including the prohibition of alcoholic beverages and tobacco, are unveiled as unoriginal ideas. The Beems continue to shake the other pillars of the church, specifically the Three Angels’ Message in the book of Revelations and the near obsession of honoring the Sabbath on the seventh day, Saturday; the closing chapter, a step-by-step exit guide for SDAs, rounds out the book nicely. On the whole, the Beems put forth a strong argument that White and the SDA church can’t see the forest for the trees, focusing intently on despair-inducing, doom-and-gloom scenarios instead of rejoicing in the good news that one need only believe in Jesus to be saved. But the evidence is laid on thick–perhaps too thick at times–and one can’t help but wonder if the Beems would have benefited more from publishing a pared-down manifesto and softening their criticisms with a little more subtlety to avoid inevitable accusations of the book being a retaliatory strike at their former church.
A well-researched undermining of SDA belief that should stir interest and outrage in the SDA fold.Pub Date: July 24, 2008
ISBN: 978-1419654671
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.
New York Times columnist Brooks (The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement, 2011, etc.) returns with another volume that walks the thin line between self-help and cultural criticism.
Sandwiched between his introduction and conclusion are eight chapters that profile exemplars (Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne are textual roommates) whose lives can, in Brooks’ view, show us the light. Given the author’s conservative bent in his column, readers may be surprised to discover that his cast includes some notable leftists, including Frances Perkins, Dorothy Day, and A. Philip Randolph. (Also included are Gens. Eisenhower and Marshall, Augustine, and George Eliot.) Throughout the book, Brooks’ pattern is fairly consistent: he sketches each individual’s life, highlighting struggles won and weaknesses overcome (or not), and extracts lessons for the rest of us. In general, he celebrates hard work, humility, self-effacement, and devotion to a true vocation. Early in his text, he adapts the “Adam I and Adam II” construction from the work of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, Adam I being the more external, career-driven human, Adam II the one who “wants to have a serene inner character.” At times, this veers near the Devil Bugs Bunny and Angel Bugs that sit on the cartoon character’s shoulders at critical moments. Brooks liberally seasons the narrative with many allusions to history, philosophy, and literature. Viktor Frankl, Edgar Allan Poe, Paul Tillich, William and Henry James, Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf—these are but a few who pop up. Although Brooks goes after the selfie generation, he does so in a fairly nuanced way, noting that it was really the World War II Greatest Generation who started the ball rolling. He is careful to emphasize that no one—even those he profiles—is anywhere near flawless.
The author’s sincere sermon—at times analytical, at times hortatory—remains a hopeful one.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9325-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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Hannah Arendt is one of the world's most profound political scientists: her scholarship is sterling, her philosophical- psychological insights staggering; two of her books Origins of Totalitariansim and Human Condition are among the few significant works in her field and our era. Whenever she publishes, it is an event. And although she is not at her best in this close study of the American and French revolutions and their meaning for the 20th century, still on every page we are in the presence of a mind of high individuality, great interest and intellectual integrity. It is her thesis that the Founding Fathers were faithful above all else to the ideal of freedom as the end and justification of revolution and thereby they assured its success. On the other hand, the Rousseau-Robespierre misalliance, the idea of the general will binding the many into the one, the transformation of the Rights of Man into the rights of Sans-Culotte, not only ultimately led to the Reign of Terror but also the whole catalogue of post-1792 ideological corruptions. The malhcurcux became the enrages, then the Industrial Revolution's miserables. And the Marxist Leninist acceptance of the new absolutism, which was done in the name of historical necessity and the name of the proletariat as a "natural" force, subsequently absolved both tyranny and blood baths as stages along the way... A powerful indictment and illumination, both immediate and enduring.
Pub Date: March 15, 1963
ISBN: 0143039903
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1963
BOOK REVIEW
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