An intriguing, narrative-driven examination of how grace can change lives.
A series of uplifting stories explores the healing power of grace.
This latest work from Sievert (God Revealed, 2014) opens with a series of questions that plague everybody, including: “Has life worn you down?” “Have you been kicked in the teeth by illness?” “Are you in crisis?” The author, who spent 30 years in the insurance business and is now in the ministry, in these pages urges his Christian readers to turn to the concept of grace as the beginning of an answer to those questions: “When you realize God’s grace, you take the first step toward accepting that unconditional gift that is yours, regardless of how much you think you do or do not deserve it.” Sievert delineates various types of grace and maps them onto various kinds of crises that crop up in people’s lives, including sexual abuse, alcoholism, and suicidal tendencies. These personal stories are told in vivid narrative detail and are followed up with the author’s reflections on how each tale illustrates a different redemptive quality of God’s grace. Some readers may be troubled by the book’s gentle but persistent implication that prayer is a fit and sufficient method for dealing with deep physiological and psychological issues like drug addiction and sexual abuse. For those readers, Sievert’s inclusion of the standard disclaimer that he in no way wishes “to diminish the importance of sound medical advice and treatment from appropriate medical professionals” may be insufficient. But it’s clear from the balance of the book that the author doesn’t mean to trivialize the problems he’s dramatizing, and he’s certainly correct to point out that the support of a personal faith (and a religious community) has a long and impressive track record in helping people cope with all kinds of trauma. This is an optimistic but nonetheless realistic account, one in which grace is freely given but still needs to be earned.
An intriguing, narrative-driven examination of how grace can change lives.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4245-5638-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Broadstreet Publishing Group, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 7, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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