by Ann C. Hutchinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 30, 2015
Despite this book’s sincere charm, even devotedly religious readers may find it too preoccupied with supernatural events.
A spiritual remembrance that focuses on a woman’s claims of prophecy.
When debut author Hutchinson was a child, she says, she started to experience dreams and visions sent by God that accurately predicted the future, which frightened her mother. Once, she dreamed of a destructive tornado, and weeks later, one devastated her home. Later, God healed her asthma, she says, but it was only years afterward that she felt prepared to fully surrender her life to him. She suffered through some difficult years, including two failed marriages and multiple abortions, but she says that she continued to experience epiphanic communications from God, who spoke to her in dreams. Other times, she says, God simply spoke out loud to her. She writes that one day, she found key passages in the Bible that were highlighted, apparently by God, to provide her with instruction. Another time, she found a message written in her handwriting but was unable to recall ever scribbling it. God warned her of other people, she says, by providing her with specific images; one former friend who betrayed her, for example, appeared to Hutchinson in a dream to have the face of a monkey. Eventually, she says, God told her to write this book and even gave her the title; she then felt that she had been called upon to assume the role of prophet and evangelize God’s word. The crux of Hutchinson’s message seems to be that an intimate relationship with God is available to anyone who opens his or her heart sufficiently and that his love isn’t reserved for some elite, chosen few. It’s hard not to be affected by the earnestness of the author’s mission or the egalitarianism of her message. However, only readers who are already very sympathetic to the notion of direct communication with God will find her story compelling. Others will likely be more incredulous. At one point, for example, the book warns that catastrophe will strike the United States as penance for its growing decadence: “The huge ship (Titanic) is America heading down the wrong path and if it does not change direction, America is going to run into that iceberg and America will sink.” Hutchinson’s eschatological alarmism, and her diagnosis of America’s moral decline, will turn off many readers.
Despite this book’s sincere charm, even devotedly religious readers may find it too preoccupied with supernatural events.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4787-5934-8
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Outskirts Press Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ludwig Bemelmans ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 23, 1955
An extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated.
Pub Date: Feb. 23, 1955
ISBN: 0670717797
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1955
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developed by Ludwig Bemelmans ; illustrated by Steven Salerno
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by Charlayne Hunter-Gault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1992
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
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