The parables of Joshua
By Joseph Girzone. (Doubleday Image Books, 2001)
This book is a collection of parables told by Joshua (a young wood-carver in a small American town, as you may remember) in the pattern of the parables in the Gospels, except that they are contemporary in their content and style. It is a series of fifty anecdotes told in a conversational style with characters and situations we can identify in contemporary settings. The author was inspired to write this because he finds that familiarity with Jesus’s parables has distanced most people from being touched by their vital messages. Girzone says: “A way to make these messages meaningful today is to dress them in modern clothes and retell them in a way that can touch a modern audience.” Joshua is presented as an amicable wanderer always on the move among the people, visiting towns and cities, appearing in a church or a synagogue, mingling and conversing with the people around. The first parable titled ‘The Parable of the Wealthy Artist’ is in answer to a woman’s question on what Joshua thought about the Church. The little story would clarify the condition of the modern church much better than a learned treatise. Similarly, he answers to queries regarding Church and politics, wealth-making, social justice and charity, environmental responsibility, meaning of human suffering and salvation, forgiveness, belief and unbelief, women in the Church, science and religion, homosexuality, racism, movies and the media. In the parable entitled “Parable of the Self- Righteous Man,” he criticises the individualistic religious of our time, pointing out that a do-it-yourself method in religion is only self-deception, because one cannot become holy by oneself. Holiness is love. The book is eminently readable. The parables have a deeply contemplative aspect to them and a deceptive simplicity.
————————————————————————————————————————————————————-
The Emperor of All maladies: A Biography of Cancer
by Siddhartha Mukherjee (Scribner, 2010)
The Indian-born Siddhartha Mukherjee is a cancer physician and researcher at the Columbia University Medical Centre, New York. His profound understanding of cancer comes through in this gripping book. It became an instant best seller running into several editions within a year of its publication, winning the Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Its extreme readability springs from the fact that it combines tremendous scholarship, literary narrative acumen and its deep human understanding of the as yet unconquered disease.
Cancer is a disease that disturbs both the common man and the medical expert, since it has acquired that status of an epidemic with no complete cure in sight. It kills about seven million people in a year! Mukherjee calls the book a “biography” for good reasons. “It is an attempt to enter the mind of this immortal illness, to understand its personality, to demystify its behaviour.” Of all the diseases that have afflicted mankind over the ages, cancer is an enigma, a mystery that has occupied the central attention of the medical community.
The scientific understanding of the disease started in the19th century with the rise of cellular biology. Mukherjee traces the history of the heroic fight with the dreaded demon, starting with the pathologist Sydney Farber, a children’s physician, who first gave hope of finding a cure, and goes on with interesting accounts of both patients and doctors, social activists, politicians and philanthropists who contributed to the growth of cancer awareness and organised attempts to deal with it. The struggle against cancer includes the fight with the tobacco industry, which had contributed greatly to the rising number of cancer deaths around the world. The book also throws light on the bitter debates, many setbacks, and triumphs. The fact remains that cancer worldwide is claiming more lives yearly than before. Prevention to a large extent is still the cure. Mukherjee ends his narrative with the story of a psychologist named Germaine, one of his patients during his student days, struggling with terminal cancer. He observes “…it was as if she had encapsulated the essence of a four-thousand-year-old war.”
To subscribe to the magazine Contact Us
