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
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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