A faith memoir with a simple but endearing Everyman tenor.
One Christian’s guidebook to a stronger, more personal religious faith.
“I have had many wrestling matches with all those forms of bondage,” writes Petree in his nonfiction debut. “I chose to stay under their yoke for a long time before ultimately learning to choose Jesus and be set free,” referring to all the worldly forces like worry or envy that Petree sees as standing between Christians and purity of faith. He adds: “I hope I’m able to help you make the same wise choice.” This is the narrative ethos of the entire book; the author reflects on the challenges he’s encountered to make the walk easier for others. In a series of fast-paced chapters, Petree draws not only on his own life story and faith encounters but also on a pleasingly wide array of other voices, including spiritual leaders like Billy Graham (“One of the best ways to get rid of discouragement is to remember that Christ is coming again”). He also reflects on less conventional sources of religious inspiration, from 15-year-old high school athlete Tyler Trent, who stirred many with his professions of faith before dying of bone cancer, to an unidentified stranger Petree met on a bus while on a high school trip to Mexico years ago. On the whole, his faith-observations manage to steer clear of both the treacle of typical Christian-inspiration titles and also the reflexive science-denial of American fundamentalism. He stresses that these Christians already have all the food they need for spiritual nourishment. “The good news is that, in terms of your soul food, your sustenance is covered simply by believing in Jesus,” he writes. “The bible [sic] should always be your main course.” Through these and other invitingly simple metaphors, Petree makes an intuitive case for a revitalized faith, and although it has the weaknesses of all intuitive cases, mainly a fondness for clichés and unsubtle concepts, the book’s direct and relatable tone wins out in the end.
A faith memoir with a simple but endearing Everyman tenor.Pub Date: March 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9736-8632-3
Page Count: 186
Publisher: WestBowPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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