A busy and action-oriented woman discovers her inner faith in this warm and winning memoir
A passionate Christian faith journey.
“I had been happy to move along in my life, never really noticing Who got me there, thinking I’d done most of the work myself,” writes Manion in her intriguing nonfiction debut. “I’d been more interested in the journey itself until then, less aware of the One guiding my way.” The account of this earlier mindset is grounded in glimpses of her autobiography, a faith narrative that effectively begins when she’s 16 in Bloomington, Indiana, and has her first intense religious feeling of revelation. The amiable, inviting narrative that unfolds will be familiar to readers of Christian faith narratives: the story arc of the wayward believer coming slowly and haltingly to born-again faith. The author returns repeatedly to the concept that God’s spiritual promptings can be subtle but persistent. “Most of us barely notice them, like birds in the sky or white noise in a room,” Manion writes. “It took years and years of training myself to listen and obey Jesus’ Spirit nudging me.” Sometimes that nudging feels more distant, especially when Manion begins to embrace running her own business, with, as she puts it, a driven, Type A achiever shrugging off her flabby stay-at-home-mom persona and stretching new muscles of independence. This sits in pointed contrast to another strand in the narrative: the idea of finding repose in faith. Paying attention to the presence of God “without thinking, without agenda, without judgment” is a challenge for Type A people like the author who might balk at the Zen-like concept of “doing nothing attentively.” In clear and engaging prose, Manion paints an inviting picture of a passionate Christian faith that isn’t the sole arena of “saints, mystics, and theologians.” The author effectively personalizes the experience of awakening to faith; Christian readers will be fascinated.
A busy and action-oriented woman discovers her inner faith in this warm and winning memoirPub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-68314-066-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Redemption Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2019
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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