Inspirational lessons hidden in a repetitive, difficult read.
In her debut collection of essays, Gulliver offers guidance for overcoming life’s challenges through embracing faith in the Holy Spirit.
This volume compiles 29 of the author’s blog posts, with each chapter focused on a specific subject and how it relates to the virtues of patience, love, forgiveness, self-control, and, especially, trusting absolutely in the will of God. It also encourages other recognizably evangelical concepts, such as baptism and tithing, and strongly stresses Bible study. The topics range from the personal (mental and physical illness, overcoming depression, and conquering addictions) and interpersonal (bullying, peer pressure, marriage, and divorce) to the inspirational, spiritual, and ethereal (the pursuit of wisdom, achieving goals, and strengthening devotion to Jesus Christ). The entries cite Scripture in a consistent, confident, and sermonlike fashion, repeatedly employing the familiar salutation of “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls” and ending with the passionate phrase, “In Jesus Name Amen!” The book also presents Satan as a force that preys on self-doubt and must be overcome through self-control and faith. Although the book regularly stresses that its points are the author’s opinions, it seems incongruent with its authoritarian tone, which casts Gulliver in the role of an inspirational adviser. Readers may also find some of the collection’s views to be controversial, such as its theories on addiction and mental illness that suggest that changes in these areas come principally from devotion to God. The chapters are cluttered with run-on sentences, confused tenses, erratic capitalization, and missing punctuation; they also employ quotation marks in an inconsistent, confusing manner. If not for the repetition of the aforementioned virtues, the book’s message would likely be lost in its muddled composition.
Inspirational lessons hidden in a repetitive, difficult read.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5127-2127-0
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2016
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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