A bewildering and tangled analysis of religion’s unconcealed truths.
A complex book attempts to uncover the esoteric mathematics that unites all of the world’s religions.
According to Meegan (The Sistine Chapel, 2012), there is a deep mathematical structure that is the internal core of all of the globe’s religions, and that has been known by their “inner hierarchies” for millennia. This esoteric science has never been revealed to an uninitiated public, and even if it were, it’s so maddeningly labyrinthine that it’s unlikely it would be understood. This symbolic code is sometimes expressed in alphanumeric writing as found in sacred literature like the Bible, but can also be seen in political documents like the U.S. Constitution, as well as in architectural creations like the Sistine Chapel or even the urban planning of Washington, D.C. The author takes great pains to discover the “matrix of wisdom” embedded in the narrative structure of Dante’s Divine Comedy. This hidden code conveys, if properly understood, the real substance of religious doctrine. For example, biblical Scriptures are better interpreted as instruments for the deliverance of this code, rather than the communication of an explicit dogma. When distilled to its essential form, the matrix embodies a double reality: ego-consciousness in general, and the unconscious mind of every human being in history. Unfortunately, it’s never entirely clear what this means, or how precisely to understand the matrix even as a mathematical construct. The author identifies various quantitative patterns—for example, there is some kind of relationship between the number of American congressmen and the number of words in the first chapter of Genesis, though it remains obscure. Meegan doesn’t explicitly try to unpack the meaning of the matrix until Chapter 11, and its discovery on his part seems to require a series of revelatory intuitions that transcend mathematical formulas. At one point, he concedes that his book might not make any sense to a reader not similarly assisted: “As I reread this manuscript I realized that even with this tsunami of images and commentary this work will still appear as a sea of chaos to the reader that does not have those ethereal helping hands guiding him or her through its labyrinth ways.” Most of the book is written in this turgid, bafflingly serpentine manner, and sometimes the prose is simply impenetrable. The author’s world-historical ambition remains impressive, but the study lacks both coherence and analytical rigor.
A bewildering and tangled analysis of religion’s unconcealed truths.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4787-7939-1
Page Count: -
Publisher: Outskirts Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2016
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
