An innovative Christian moral handbook for attorneys.
A daily devotional work seeks to encourage lawyers with biblical wisdom.
Debut author Mounts isn’t an attorney, but in 30 years of ministry he’s met his fair share of them and found them both inspired and challenged. Ideally, the law is an exemplary Christian instrument insofar as it promotes justice and freedom, zealously pursues the truth, and is microcosmic of the judgment that the Lord will one day visit upon humanity. In fact, the author describes Jesus as a kind of spiritual attorney who represents readers before God. That said, lawyers are not always the shining examples of devotion that they could be: “While today’s American attorney bears no resemblance to the first-century religious lawyer in Israel, they do illustrate a group generally found inattentive to Jesus Christ and his way to life.” Instead of writing a hectoring screed, Mounts composed this devotional book, meant to provide a combination of motivation and counsel to attorneys. There are 91 chapters, and each begins with a pertinent biblical quotation (or several) followed by commentary on the way in which this passage furnishes guidance for lawyers. Each concludes with an “action plan,” a short paragraph that issues more specific suggestions about how to put that instruction into practice. The advice is wide-ranging—Mounts discusses the pitfalls of workaholics as mentioned in the Psalms, how to manage the anxiety of law school (Paul’s Letter to the Philippians), and the issues of guilt and judgment in terms of the infamous O.J. Simpson trial. There are more general disquisitions, too—the author offers some thoughts on race and diversity, which mine not only Pauline letters, but also LULAC v. Perry. Mounts’ use of the Bible is impressively clever, and he consistently finds creative ways to relate scriptural wisdom to lawyerly life. This is also a refreshingly cheerful book that genuinely attempts to rehabilitate the reputation of attorneys—something the author explicitly treats in a chapter titled “Lovable Lawyers”—by bringing them to Jesus. This work should appeal to lawyers looking to renew their Christian faith.
An innovative Christian moral handbook for attorneys.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6778-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
