An often engaging collection of inspirational meetings.
A Christian man relates stories of random encounters in coffee shops.
The latest from McIntyre (Shackled Yet Free, 2011) is an attempt to capture how serendipitous and sometimes-momentous spiritual events can begin with a simple encounters. The author firmly believes that God uses everyday people as his messengers (“ordinary people to do extraordinary things,” as he puts it), and he’s tried to satisfy what he calls humanity’s “innate desire to fellowship” in coffee shops around the country. In them, he meets people at random, learns their stories, and shares his own. McIntyre espouses a straightforward, fundamentalist Christianity that sees God’s hand in everything, and the book is full of stories that take this point of view; however, they may confuse skeptics, even as they have fellow believers nodding their heads in agreement. The author’s 2-year-old daughter was struck by a neighbor’s car in one story, for instance; fortunately, she wasn’t injured, and McIntyre writes that the driver “was able to stop the vehicle” in time “by divine intervention”; however, he doesn’t address why God would allow the accident to occur at all. “Reaching out to others is not only something worth doing, but it is God’s commandment for us,” he writes, and similarly optimistic affirmations fill the book. An opening assumption that all atheists believe that the universe came “together by accident” is inaccurate, but in general, the author’s compassionate faith that “every one of us has a calling to be a planter” carries the book over its few rough patches. Not all readers will come away convinced that the coincidences that McIntyre describes are heaven-sent, but even doubters may hope to meet him in a coffee shop themselves someday.
An often engaging collection of inspirational meetings.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-64367-643-2
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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