A short, passionate attempt to discern America’s place in God’s ultimate plan.
In her latest book, the main obstacle faced by Townsend (Thine is the Kingdom, 2011 etc.) is one she quite honestly acknowledges right up front: America has no place in biblical prophecy. Nothing even close to a specific allusion to the United States is made in the Old Testament, the New Testament or the Book of Revelation. “I have searched the Bible for some reference of our involvement or some description of a land mass which would describe the United States,” Townsend writes, but “I could not find it.” Townsend overcomes this seemingly insuperable obstacle in the only way possible: She looks to a higher power for additional information. “I dedicate this book to the Holy Spirit of God,” she writes, “who helped me to write it.” Specifically, she went on a four-day fast in 2009 and received “insight from God” about not only America’s role in coming days of tribulation but also in the confused and stressful present. “If we ever needed God to be part of our lives,” Townsend emphasizes, “we really do need His direction now.” There follows a short but systematic and very readable tour through a great deal of biblical prophetic verses, with particular emphasis on the Revelation. There are questionable portions: An “artist’s rendition of ancient ships on the open oceans,” for instance, shows an 18th century sailing vessel, and in a discussion of the prophet John’s ignorance of the existence of North and South America, readers are told: that “John’s whole earth, in reality, is truly only about half of our planet,” when in actual reality North and South America—and Israel—comprise about one-tenth of the planet. Nevertheless, the book’s central thrust is that, assuming we “take back our nation and reestablish the Godly principles we once had,” God has preserved for the United States a role as “the end-time influence.” Christians, at least, will find these extrapolations interesting, especially, of course, American Christians. A concise, fascinating account of a personal revelation of America’s spiritual destiny.
Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1456796570
Page Count: 80
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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