A concise overview of how strong beliefs helped a family through trying times.
In this debut memoir, an engineer revisits his family’s most difficult moments and shares realizations about God that helped him through.
“Our neighborhood was fit for a Rockwell painting,” Pratt writes. “We were a typical early ’60s family.” But, like so many other “typical” families, they endured hardships and difficulties; Pratt’s father left the family for another woman, the author writes; his mother had difficulty, as a divorced single mother, finding work and even housing. They and the author’s sister ended up in a simple duplex on the “wrong side of the tracks” in Springfield, Tennessee. Despite this, Pratt writes that he saw God working within his life, eventually bringing his father home and later introducing the author to his own future wife. Pratt would go on to become a successful engineer in Texas; his work took him all over the world. But the author focuses on the idea that when everything is going well, things can fall apart: “The season of dancing would yield to a season of mourning.” Tragically, his son Joshua’s first child was stillborn; the same year, the family lost the author’s mother-in-law as well as a beloved pet. While relating these tragedies, however, Pratt takes the opportunity to explore the story of Job, the nature of God’s help, and the way his family eventually healed. Overall, the author does an excellent job of imbuing seemingly ordinary events with meaning by weaving in numerous biblical references. For example, he blends the stories of Ruth, David and Goliath, and Paul with various memories, such as when Pratt’s mother called the police on him for leaving the house without permission when he was 9 or when Pratt’s disabled son prepared to navigate the Atlanta airport by himself. The main focus though, is on the year of losses, which leaves some other accounts underdeveloped, such as Pratt’s time in Spain. However, for Christian readers, Pratt provides excellent examples of his conviction that “With God there is always a rest of the story.”
A concise overview of how strong beliefs helped a family through trying times.Pub Date: March 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973623-04-5
Page Count: 132
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 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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