A helpful and funny book about the many benefits, spiritual and otherwise, that can come from escaping workplace stress.
A successful government employee leaves his job to find renewed interest in both life and faith.
Winters had just taken a new job at an intimidating but unnamed, three-letter government agency when embarrassing pains landed him in the hospital and ended with a diabetes diagnosis. The stress of his new position, a feeling of malaise within his aging church, and a medical mandate to get healthier gave him the idea to take a break from his current life well beyond the usual vacation. Soon a spiritual encounter at a prayer circle confirmed that what he needed was a true sabbatical. Winters’ debut book becomes a Christian-focused how-to for readers wanting their own versions of Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love–style break from everyday tensions. Winters never left the country nor found the love of his life on a beach, but he did meticulously chronicle the difficulties and necessary strategies for maintaining income, improving friendships, and getting his health under control while on a six-month break from the workforce. With specific spiritual questions like “What barriers had kept me from being who I should be?” and “How could I live a resurrected life?” Winters dedicated his days to praying, reflecting, and reading numerous books, including the works of preacher Jentezen Franklin. He slowly overcame the crippling anxiety that began with his new job and started the long road to a healthier lifestyle, documenting his return to work with a new appreciation, having “discovered again that people were generally God’s coolest creation.” In his account, Winters tempers the heavier and more distressing stories of his medical issues and past tragedies with self-deprecating but warm humor that keeps a largely introspective story intriguing. Those wanting to escape their own daily grinds for an extended period of time should find useful, practical advice in his pages (for example, in an appendix he counsels: “Prepare to journal about how you feel and react to significant insights during the sabbatical. It is important to learn some lasting lessons”). But it is Christian readers who will likely connect most with his rekindled spirituality and lighthearted biblical jokes—“[his] favorite Scripture about finances was ‘Jesus wept’ ”—and take away the most from his refreshed vigor.
A helpful and funny book about the many benefits, spiritual and otherwise, that can come from escaping workplace stress.Pub Date: July 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9977747-0-2
Page Count: 212
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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