A dramatic biography, hampered by some shopworn conclusions.
A memoir recounts one man’s spiritual journey to India and synopsizes the religious lessons he learned.
Debut author Bray grew up in Chicago in a thoroughly Christian household; his father was a well-known evangelical minister. However, his own faith, he says, was inauthentic, more self-serving and hypocritical than motivated by a genuine desire to emulate Jesus’ example. While attending the Moody Bible Institute in 1964, he was elected president of the India Prayer Band; he joined not out of any abiding interest in India but because of his attraction to the group’s female professor. However, one night, while praying for the many non-Christian souls in the South Asian country, he experienced a profound spiritual experience—a feeling of a tempestuous war within himself between God’s love and demonic forces. His hands were inexorably drawn to a nearby map—specifically, to Rajasthan, an Indian state on the border with Pakistan, and the city of Kota Junction. The author interpreted this as a sign that God was revealing the stage of Bray’s holy mission. Much to the dismay of his friends and family, he dropped out of school, abandoned his plans to marry his high school sweetheart, surrendered claims to his family inheritance, and left for India by way of Europe. His time in the country was filled with dejection and failure, and he was eventually expelled by the Indian government. However, the experience led him to build a relationship with Jesus and craft what he calls a “yielded life.” Overall, Bray’s account is a dramatic one and it’s a gripping read as a story of adventure. He distills his spiritual discoveries down into “five waypoints,” which include sensible, if familiar, directives to pray always and do the work of God. The author should be commended for avoiding the idea of “instant spirituality”; he wisely warns the reader that living a truly spiritual life is a challenge. However, there isn’t much here that will be new to regular readers of spiritual self-help books, and even the most committed Christians may tire of the author’s apparent dependence on sudden revelations for guidance.
A dramatic biography, hampered by some shopworn conclusions.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 151
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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