Neither a strong, coherent spiritual guide nor a work of wisdom.
A spiritual guide for members of the New Church, a denomination whose teachings are from the book of Revelations.
“…If you stay with me, I will lead you into many truths, in which you never thought to be possible,” Emmanuel writes, and many “truths” are indeed revealed in this wordy volume. According to the author, man is a little world, and living within him are spirits and angels. Man has no thoughts of his own, and each individual is a little heaven and a little hell. The closer man draws to the Lord, the more he receives from the Lord. The book proceeds thusly, in a stream-of-conscious format with no paragraph breaks or organizing principle, aside from chapter headings. It’s as if James Joyce decided to confront spiritual issues while abandoning his strong imagery and innovative language. In general, the author seems to strive toward a pure connection with God without the filter of a self to interpret it. However, this results in a lack of an authoritative voice. Emmanuel takes on a variety of issues simultaneously without unpacking them to unleash their wisdom. It’s not that he makes false claims or that the cited scripture is inaccurate, but the many rhetorical questions that he attempts to answer are contradictory and render the spiritual questions meaningless. A beginning summary states that this book was written for members of the New Church, which, in the book of Revelations, is the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven from the Lord. “The words are meant only for those who are seeking truths of the Kingdom of Heaven. If you are not seeking these truths…these words will make little sense to you,” Emmanuel writes. The words do sometimes make sense but the lack of organization makes it impossible for them to serve as a guide to God’s wisdom.
Neither a strong, coherent spiritual guide nor a work of wisdom.Pub Date: May 23, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4257-5563-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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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