by Beth Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2015
An intriguing but overlong spiritual tale with striking emotional insights.
Unseen angels surround their assigned humans and battle demons who whisper destruction in this Christian novel.
Young pastor John Miles marries Lindsey, who was in her mother Ellie’s womb when she survived a car crash that killed her other daughter, Rose. Ellie is left an embittered woman whom Lindsey tries to comfort by naming her and John’s first daughter Rosie. Unbeknown to most people except for Rosie and a few sensitive humans, there is a war being waged around this family and their friends against the demons who crouch on mortals’ shoulders. Four angels—Meris, the leader; Nardic, inexperienced and impatient to vanquish evil; Galdon; and impetuous Flint—receive strength from human prayers to protect their charges from the demons murmuring in their ears. John, himself a survivor of childhood cancer, nevertheless gets a sense that Lindsey and Rosie display a shimmer or nimbus he can sometimes see; he wants to preach about it but fears being disbelieved or simply wrong. As he expands his ministry to include a retirement home, John forms a relationship with resident Doug Roberts and his son, Carl, who has spent time in prison and harbors a terrible secret. As John tries to break through to both Ellie and Carl, 8-year-old Rosie leads the way by recognizing and speaking to Nardic, her guardian angel. Green’s (The Club, 2014, etc.) novel, the first installment of a series, deftly shows demons causing self-recrimination, fear, scorn, and guilt and portrays salvation as a letting go of negative baggage rather than the meek acceptance of God’s will or the confession of sins. The well-developed angels also grow spiritually in learning to protect humans who repeatedly make poor choices. But the book often tells rather than shows, with the story turning a bit preachy when the angels’ battles render the human characters too passive. In addition, the chapters introducing Doug and Carl could have been tightened and combined more dramatically. Much of the circuitous dialogue could also have been trimmed to better highlight the story’s funny and tender moments. Furthermore, some complex, powerful scenes unfortunately get buried by incidentals.
An intriguing but overlong spiritual tale with striking emotional insights.Pub Date: April 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5117-7080-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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