A vigorously written and thought-provoking inspirational guide to changing your path in life.
A debut manual looks at St. Paul’s Damascus road experience as a template for human contemplation.
Early on, Assisi assures his readers that despite its title, his book is not about organized religion. Rather, it’s about “unpacking a personal experience of an incredible person who decided to change himself—an experience from which we can hopefully transfer some wisdom into our lives.” As the title indicates, this incredible person is Saul of Tarsus, who had a vision on the road to Damascus and converted to Christianity. This presence of the divine is central to the author’s contentions here; everyone, he maintains, has a one-on-one relationship with what he refers to as “G.O.D.—the Guiding, Designing, Organizing force of the universe. Or whatever other nomenclature one chooses.” Some readers may find these opening assertions confusing—Saul doesn’t decide to transform himself, for instance; he’s essentially ordered to do so by direct divine intervention. And that divine intervention is not some generalized Guiding, Designing, Organizing force but very specifically the Christian God. Still, Assisi smoothly and invitingly broadens his inquiry to include the universal human desire for meaning and purpose in life and his readings of the Paul story. He’s particularly insightful on the many ways Paul’s tale more closely reflects the Christian faith experience than the stories of the other disciples. “Paul never met Jesus in the flesh, he never spent time with him, never had a chance to listen to his teachings directly from him, never followed him in his wanderings or preachings,” the author writes. “Paul was like most of the Gentiles—all who would hear about Christ, but not from Christ. Like us.” In a series of very readable chapters, Assisi turns the underlying precepts of the Paul story—a tale of being “called to change”—into a series of lessons designed to address a broad array of human experiences, from coping with complicated relationships to dealing with grief. The result is a book that succeeds in the tricky feat of being intriguingly spiritual without being explicitly religious.
A vigorously written and thought-provoking inspirational guide to changing your path in life.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-73596-752-3
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Rivail Publishing Company
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.
A noted actor turns to verse: “Poems are a Saturday in the middle of the week.”
McConaughey, author of the gracefully written memoir Greenlights, has been writing poems since his teens, closing with one “written in an Australian bathtub” that reads just as a poem by an 18-year-old (Rimbaud excepted) should read: “Ignorant minds of the fortunate man / Blind of the fate shaping every land.” McConaughey is fearless in his commitment to the rhyme, no matter how slight the result (“Oops, took a quick peek at the sky before I got my glasses, / now I can’t see shit, sure hope this passes”). And, sad to say, the slight is what is most on display throughout, punctuated by some odd koanlike aperçus: “Eating all we can / at the all-we-can-eat buffet, / gives us a 3.8 education / and a 4.2 GPA.” “Never give up your right to do the next right thing. This is how we find our way home.” “Memory never forgets. Even though we do.” The prayer portion of the program is deeply felt, but it’s just as sentimental; only when he writes of life-changing events—a court appearance to file a restraining order against a stalker, his decision to quit smoking weed—do we catch a glimpse of the effortlessly fluent, effortlessly charming McConaughey as exemplified by the David Wooderson (“alright, alright, alright”) of Dazed and Confused. The rest is mostly a soufflé in verse. McConaughey’s heart is very clearly in the right place, but on the whole the book suggests an old saw: Don’t give up your day job.
It’s not Shakespeare, not by a long shot. But at least it’s not James Franco.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781984862105
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
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