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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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