A cheerful reflection on a life of Christian observance, and a tender remembrance of loved ones lost.
A debut book offers a brief meditation on love, family, and religious devotion.
Belknap has never tried his hand at writing before, but after a long life for which he’s brimming with gratitude, he felt inspired to put pen to paper. An engineer by training, he traveled the world working for oil companies, visiting Colombia, Iran, and England. He eventually married Carolyn, his first wife, but after a series of debilitating illnesses, she finally died. Belknap also tragically lost a daughter to a car accident, and his second wife, Donna, died as well. But no matter what hardships befell him, Belknap found solace and encouragement in his Christian faith. More specifically, an unconditional love of Jesus served as ballast during stormy seas. This is a very short book—the author more than once refers to it as an “essay”—and can be read in one relatively short sitting. Part self-help book, part memoir, the volume is also an homage to Donna—Belknap even provides a chapter-length poem that memorializes his love for her and includes these lines: “She truly loved me too, and often told me so. / She frequently told me that she loved me more every day, / and I often told her I loved her more every day too.” The author’s prose is unadorned and lucid, and consistently suffused with an unpretentiously avuncular charm. Occasionally, there are some excesses: for example, after a life filled with the blessings of family, it seems implausible when the author claims that writing this book “has been the most rewarding experience of my life.” Furthermore, his perspective is unabashedly Christian, so the message is unlikely to resonate with the unconverted. But it should appeal even to those who are already deeply committed to Christianity, because the book emphasizes not just accepting God, but being open to the myriad ways he communicates to his flock: “One time, a long time ago, in reviewing my life with God, I recall a time when God may have been talking to me and I was not listening, did not want to hear, or most likely had not learned to listen.” The readers who will get the most out of the work will surely be those who know the author, but Christians looking for a quick source of encouragement should be satisfied.
A cheerful reflection on a life of Christian observance, and a tender remembrance of loved ones lost.Pub Date: June 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-8495-0
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2016
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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