Next book

TRANSFORMING MOMENTS WITH GOD

NINETY DEVOTIONS TO STRENGTHEN YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

A collection of brief, engaging thoughts to complement Christian Bible study.

King (Steps to the Victorious Walk, 2007, etc.), an evangelist pastor, offers an array of short daily devotionals about Bible verses and their applications to daily life.

In his latest book, the author turns his attention to helping readers build their relationship with God. He’s assembled 90 “devotions,” including for each a Bible verse, some of his own reflections and stories, and what he calls a “meditational thought”: a “thought- provoking point designed to help the reader experience the truth at hand more deeply.” King writes in his introduction that “[t]hose who take a minute and meditate on these nuggets will find the spiritual gold.” Each meditation builds upon the verse in question, leading to King’s clear, succinct final point; for example, he takes a line from Psalm 139, “for I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” and uses it as a way to discuss God’s creation: “Who else but our awesome God could have created such wonder?” He then builds to the meditational thought: “God made all originals and no copies.” Such thoughts are short and familiar but often avoid cliché. King often uses them to rephrase ideas that are common to devotionals, modifying them to be a bit more engaging. Many of them, such as “God is our best insurance,” “Attitude often determines altitude,” and “Names don’t make people, people make names,” should provide readers with springboards for personal meditation. King also contextualizes his summations in a variety of ways, drawing from the verses, real-world examples or his own views. He writes in an inviting, relaxed tone that fits with the book’s structure. Readers will be drawn in and comforted by his friendly nature and left with much to consider.

A collection of brief, engaging thoughts to complement Christian Bible study.

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2014

ISBN: 978-1462739059

Page Count: 196

Publisher: CrossBooks

Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2014

Categories:
Next book

SLEEPERS

An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)

Pub Date: July 10, 1995

ISBN: 0-345-39606-5

Page Count: 432

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995

Categories:
Next book

THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE

50TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

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

Categories:
Close Quickview