Cozy fireside conversations with a dozen contemporary writers on their faith, carefully arranged and thoughtfully conceived. Brown (English/Calvin Coll.) has gathered together conversations with 12 Christian writers, most of whom say they are uncomfortable with that term. The authors range from those renowned in Christian circles (Frederick Buechner and Walter Wangerin) to the more widely famous (Garrison Keillor, who is very provocative and outspoken about his vision for the church, and southern hellion Will Campbell). Brown also includes writers who are not yet household names, like newcomer Elizabeth Dewberry and longtime novelist Doris Betts, and popular authors most readers probably don't think of as Christian, like mystery writer Robert Goldsborough. Compiler Brown is fully engaged in these conversations, but allows the writers to speak for themselves (his introduction is less than three pages long, a refreshing brevity). Implicitly, his subtext seems to be that for these writers, there are a dozen different ways of manifesting their faith in their work. Brown is very critical of the throw-away fiction found in most Christian bookstores, and is intrigued by the fact that some of these bookstores won't even stock meaty novelists such as Campbell or Buechner. The writers discuss their stylistic and theological influences (Graham Greene, Annie Dillard, and Walker Percy win high marks from many). They reflect upon their perceived audiences, occasional hate mail, and stinging reviews; it is difficult, it seems, to write fiction with a Christian message when many Christian readers seem to prefer simplistic morality tales with squeaky-clean language, and when ``secular'' readers are often turned off by theology. Brown has included a useful bibliography for each writer, pointing to further pleasures. The book's only real flaw is its fairly narrow perspective: All but one of the subjects are mainline Protestant (the exception being Jon Hassler, who is Catholic), most are male, and all are white. (12 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8028-4313-1
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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