An intimate work with exceptional personal tales that overshadow the author’s broader thoughts on sorrow.
A Baptist pastor recounts his experiences with grief in the wake of his wife’s death.
“I had performed many funerals for church members over the years, and I thought I understood their spouses’ feelings,” writes McEntire at the beginning of his debut memoir. “Clearly, I did not understand.” His journey through despair started on a long-awaited vacation with his wife, Wanda. On the beaches of South Carolina, they finally indulged in alone time—McEntire was the type of dedicated minister who often couldn’t help but answer the phone, even though he knew it would likely be a death or emergency that would derail his personal plans. After this perfect time spent together, however, McEntire endured his most horrible day. After hours of Wanda hardly breathing, they traveled to a hospital by ambulance and learned that she would have to be put on a ventilator. In the book’s most heartbreaking scene, he whispers, “Wanda, if Jesus is reaching out to you, take Him by the hands and go be with Him,” moments before she dies. McEntire then delves into his intense anguish, recalling all of the congregation members who rushed to his aid and his continual struggle to fill the empty spaces Wanda left. His descriptions of private conversations and simple, but profound events such as coming back to his house after the funeral all center on the response he eventually gives when people ask how he is doing: “Tremendous emptiness and incredible fullness.” It is in these more narrative passages, in which McEntire lets himself get lost in the tales of his life with Wanda and her final moments, that his writing is the most effective. You can almost hear his voice with a folksy drawl narrating their romance with lines like: “This old North Carolina boy had to travel to the cotton and tobacco fields of Virginia to find her.” But while some of his more extended thoughts on grief bring religion front and center, they fail to have the same impact as his first-person stories, making those reflections perhaps better suited for the pulpit than the page.
An intimate work with exceptional personal tales that overshadow the author’s broader thoughts on sorrow.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-7509-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2017
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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