A faith-infused guide for the end of life.
Lynch, who oversees a large Catholic parish and has officiated at over 1,500 funerals, has extensive firsthand knowledge of the peculiar stresses and revelations that come to the dying and their loved ones. With co-author Mariconda, he’s written a manual on this strangest of times in anyone’s life—after a terminal diagnosis but before death itself. He attempts to assure his readers that the depth of their religious faith is irrelevant since an amorphous spiritual connection binds us all—“a natural thrust toward wholeness, rooted in our oneness with all that is, was, and will be.” But these assurances notwithstanding, the book abounds with Judeo-Christian assumptions and is probably best suited for that readership (“Regardless of spiritual practice or lack of it we are all, at the center of our being, one with God,” for example, will hardly do Hindus—to say nothing of atheists—much good). But even so, Lynch and Mariconda’s broad-based, narrative-driven work ranges from absorbing accounts of encounters with dying men and women (some of these encounters are tough reading; the dying can be their own harshest critics) to engaging meditations on the human reluctance to think about death. The string of personal anecdotes well-illustrates the variety of reactions people have when encountering the final months of their lives; these stories form a vital counterpoint to the authors’ more philosophical thoughts on the subjects of terminal illness, dying, death, and the meaning of life, which is never far from the main current of the book: “We’re all, in varying degrees, handicapped by the rubble that litters the inner fields of our hearts.”
An expansive, richly sympathetic book about the last and least-understood phase of life.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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