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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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