For the benefit of the skeptical would-be faithful (dubbed here “neoagnostics”), journalist Gallagher offers an autobiographical, selectively bicoastal look at liberal religious experience in America today. Gallagher (I.D: How Temperament and Experience Create the Individual, 1996) updates Immanuel Kant’s classic formulation of humanity’s three principal questions (What can I know? What ought I do? What can I hope?) to: What is real? What do I feel?, What are my choices? The update reflects the influence of what Gallagher calls millennial religion, by which she means those experiential, nonjudgmental, pluralistic ways of being religious that characterize the spiritual life of some, mostly urban, Americans. (“Millennial” is an unfortunate coinage for this use, since for traditional Christians it implies apocalypse, while for religious non-Christians, who measure time otherwise than from Christ’s birth, it has little currency at all.) Casual and breezy language characterizes much of this self-consciously journalistic romp between such diverse religious centers as Congregation B—nai Jeshurun (a popular synagogue in New York City), the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (also in New York), and the Sonoma Mountain Zen Center (California). Gallagher’s book comprises recountings of worship, meditation, and study experiences she has had at these and like religious institutions, as well as interviews with their respective leaders and flocks. The focus primarily on Judaism, Christianity, and Zen Buddhism reflects the author’s confessed status as a Catholic-bred, meditation-practicing spouse of a Jewish man. The casual style breeds some errors, as in the retelling of the biblical story of the burning bush (which Moses turns toward initially, not away from, as Gallagher narrates), or the medieval Jewish reaction to Maimonides (who in his own lifetime never faced a serious threat of excommunication, as Gallagher implies). But the author has a good ear for the memorable remark, as of the contemplative nun who said of her life, it “is sheer faith most of the time. Very sheer.” An occasionally successful attempt to capture in journalistic prose some varied depths of (post)modern religious experience. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44794-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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