This Christian self-help book won’t reach a broad audience, but fellow travelers will find consolation in its message.
A meditation on the healing power of miracles, and on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Both the religious and therapeutic communities share the concept of personal healing as an antidote to trauma, but the two traditions rarely coexist harmoniously. Romeo (Traveling with the Life-Giver, 2012, etc.), a licensed marriage and family therapist, effectively tries to weave them into a common fabric in a work that’s both a memoir and a spiritually charged self-improvement manual. She candidly discusses her troubled past, which included her parents’ divorce, her volatile marriage, and her struggles with alcohol dependency and depression. The book’s central focus is twofold as it looks at the transformative power of divine miracles and the therapeutic value of forging a connection with Jesus. The miracles that Romeo says she encountered are numerous and extraordinary: she writes that a pastor instantaneously fixed her uneven legs, much to the astonishment of her chiropractor, and that another pastor made gold teeth suddenly appear in the mouths of his flock. She also writes that after her children discovered that one of their beloved pet fish had died, she resurrected it through touch; at another point, she says that she was plagued by demonic voices and distress, but that she had them successfully exorcised. Her most poignant remembrances revolve around spiritual metamorphoses, such as her husband’s: after turning to God, she says, he quit drinking and managed to find inner peace. Romeo doesn’t describe her trust in Jesus in theological terms, but in those of loving friendship: “I am deeply convinced that Jesus wants us to experience Him.” Eventually, she came to realize that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder; armed with that knowledge and her newfound relationship with Jesus, she turned her life around, and even weathered the death of her husband. The author is admirably forthcoming about her personal challenges, and it’s impossible not to be inspired by the progress she achieved. Given the emphasis on miracles, though, her book is unlikely to appeal to secular or even merely moderately religious readers. Many will wish that she’d furnished more actionable, nonreligious counsel, and that she had written more as a therapist than as a spiritual disciple. However, this book remains an affecting source of encouragement for those who share the author’s theological inclinations.
This Christian self-help book won’t reach a broad audience, but fellow travelers will find consolation in its message.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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