Measured, reliable financial advice provided with a smooth overlay of Christianity.
A five-point program for Christian-themed financial security.
In his nonfiction debut, Finch expands on a nine-hour seminar he developed in the 1980s designed to give his readers a step-by-step plan for achieving first financial stability and then prosperity. Finch organizes his plan under large umbrella categories like “Principle of STEWARDSHIP,” “Principle of COMMUNICATION,” and “Principle of GIVING,” and he spices up the flow of his well-designed book with insets that bear simple mottos; e.g., “Building a lifestyle using the credit card benefits the creditor at the expense of the debtor.” Here, God and wealth are harmonized; readers are assured that God wants them to prosper but expects them to do their parts, which is where Finch and his manual come in. He presents a straightforward set of financial principles—avoid debt, set a budget and stick to it, live within your means—and reminds us that “we live in a society that emphasizes consumption.” The responsibility for resisting such acquisitiveness falls squarely on our own shoulders. Better not to rely on programs like Social Security (which Finch characterizes as a “Ponzi scheme”) or a government mired in runaway deficit spending. However, “if God wants you to have a life of abundance,” he writes, addressing the central worry of his subject, “the fact that some of this abundance is found in material possessions is not a sin.” When Finch asserts “God is not asking us to live on the edge of existence,” he’s preaching a variation of the very popular “prosperity gospel” in which “Christian” and “wealthy” aren’t contradictory concepts. Many of his Christian readers will be grateful for this, and even non-Christians can benefit from the sound financial common sense he provides.
Measured, reliable financial advice provided with a smooth overlay of Christianity.Pub Date: July 31, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4969-6642-1
Page Count: 284
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2017
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
