A winningly smart and plainspoken set of assurances for the Christian walk with God.
A writer calls on Christians to renew their faith.
In his nonfiction book, Kwan (Towards a 4-Ships Driven Culture, 2009) seeks to remind Christian communities of the basics of their faith, the core understandings at the heart of their beliefs. In a series of rapid-fire reflections, the author touches on a wide variety of subjects, from the assorted ways congregations can develop “God-pleasing worship services” to the possible reasons behind the decline of many churches in North America to more effective and heartfelt ways to pray. The author writes with intelligence and scope about issues challenging faith communities today, including the changing nature of fellowships, which can be reinvigorated with such simple activities as “Bible study, singing, sharing, listening, and even casual chatting.” (He also notes that connections with God can be “personal, unshared, and intimate,” as they were with King David.) Kwan expounds at some length on an interpretive reading of the Ten Commandments that’s both conversational and sweeping: “The Ten Commandments are like the rules of baseball; they restrict how the game is played but do not prohibit the sport’s objective—scoring runs.” One of the book’s most persistent and ultimately persuasive motifs is the author’s frequent linking of religious points to personal notes from his own life. He ruminates on matters large and small, from the pleasures of building a church offering box that sees service for many years to the visceral understanding he acquired about worship when he first looked at his newborn daughter. (“God was delighted when He observed His crowning creation that bore His image,” he realized.) At the heart of Kwan’s clear and well-written observations is a straightforward declaration of humanity’s relationship to God: “Humankind exists for its Creator’s purpose. God designed humanity for Himself and His pleasure,” imbuing people with “the intelligence to discern, free will to choose, passion to show enthusiasm, honor to lay down, and a spiritual nature to commune with God.”
A winningly smart and plainspoken set of assurances for the Christian walk with God.Pub Date: April 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973654-58-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2020
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
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