A reflective, persuasive look at spiritual development for young Christian women, told by someone who’s been there.
In her debut nonfiction work, Ciminello offers wisdom for teenage girls and young women based on Christian spirituality.
Without holding back, the author describes how, like many young Christian woman, she struggled to accept God’s will when it didn’t mesh with her own desires or expectations. Each chapter describes a stumbling block Ciminello confronted during her formative years, and these stumbling blocks are similar to those faced by many teen girls, especially those pursuing Christian lives. For instance, she describes how she spent the majority of her senior prom waiting for her date to arrive with her corsage. The date—a friend she went with since her crush asked another girl—arrived late and without the corsage, and Ciminello missed out on having fun that evening because she refused to act against her expectations. Alongside each embarrassing and honest story, the author provides a spiritual lesson through Scripture and faith-based reflection. She connects her prom experience to the way that one might wait for life to “begin” even though all one needs has already been gifted by God. Each chapter closes with a journal entry from Ciminello’s past and space for the reader to write a journal entry of her own, rounding the lesson off in a personal manner. This book is best described as personal. By using stories from her own life, the author gains the authority of experience while maintaining a friendly, conversational voice. As such, she can make firm statements about right and wrong and the importance of following God without seeming haughty. Her tone is reminiscent of one a gentle older sister might use in guiding her younger counterpart, making the lessons she offers easy to accept. Additionally, Ciminello crafts her book with a clean structure, making it even easier for readers to follow. Aside from maintaining a similar, sensible form, each chapter is long enough to provide real food for thought without dragging on and causing attentions to drift, further improving the work’s readability.
A reflective, persuasive look at spiritual development for young Christian women, told by someone who’s been there.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490802565
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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