An idiosyncratic but engaging religious self-help guide.
Washington (Tools for Effective Prayer, 2016), the senior pastor of the Abundant Life Community Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico, offers advice on how to live one’s best life in this motivational Christian work.
God wants people to be victorious in their lives, says the author, but how many people truly feel that way? In this book, he argues that the problem may be that they’re not correctly applying the regimen that God outlined in the Bible: “you must totally know, understand, and effectively execute the wisdom and divine strategy for victory that is recorded in Scripture,” he says. According to Washington, the portion of the Bible that best illustrates how God leads his followers to victory is the Book of Nehemiah. In it, Nehemiah, the Jewish cupbearer to the Persian king Artaxerxes, rebuilds the Jewish temple in Jerusalem, following the word of God. Using this story as a template, Washington outlines the three-step process to following God’s plan for victory: “Starting the Journey,” “Preparing and Getting Ready,” and “Executing the Divine Strategy.” Along the way, he discusses the necessity of coming to terms with one’s sins, the importance of prayer, and how to deal with guilt, shame, anger, and other negative emotions. Washington writes in a buoyant, easily digestible prose style that draws as much on the vocabulary of the modern self-help culture as it is does on the language of the Bible: “as you start living in abundance, a great fight is sure to come your way….Accept and embrace this, just like the example set by Nehemiah and the Jews.” As in his previous work on prayer, the author displays his love of acronyms (“Frequent Actions Causing Troublesome Situations—FACTS”) and his willingness to tackle subjects at length (the book is more than 500 pages long). Readers looking for motivation with a basis in Christianity may find assurance here, although others may see it as an attempt to repackage old ideas in a trendier wrapper.
An idiosyncratic but engaging religious self-help guide.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8658-3
Page Count: 520
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2018
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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