A positive story about the power of faith and forgiveness.
In her debut memoir, a Texas woman recounts how her faith in God helped her through her husband’s job loss, the deaths of loved ones, and an attempt on her life.
Musgrave’s inspirational book is a brief but powerful account of a number of tragedies she suffered in a span of just six months. Three phone calls, in particular, changed her life. In the first, her business-executive husband told her that he’d just been let go from his job after 28 years. Then came a call from her sister, four months later, saying that their father had suddenly died of a heart attack. A few weeks later, she received what may have been the worst call of all: her daughter had committed suicide and left her parents a note saying that she wanted them to raise her 6-year-old son. As if that combination of circumstances wasn’t soul-crushing enough, the author was later shot in a robbery attempt outside a store and nearly lost her life; she went on to battle intense pain and extensive nerve damage from a bullet lodged in her spine. Remarkably, despite all this heartache, the book manages to be quite uplifting overall. For example, the author often returns to a theme of simple faith, including the literally childlike faith of her grandson, who saw her crying one day and said, “Why don’t you do like I do…I just call on Jesus to help me, and He always does.” She says that her decision to study the Bible was the best one of her life and explains how the Scriptures gave her hope for the future. She also writes about forgiving her shooter: “If this young man…would ask God to forgive him, he could be my next-door neighbor in heaven.” Although the book is clearly written and easy to understand, a few passages use religious language that may be unfamiliar to some readers, such as when she calls her trust in herself “my arm of flesh.” This story of her rich, full life doesn’t describe merely surviving these ordeals, though—she also tells of going on to sing for the governor of Texas, start a decorating business, and win the Ms. Mature Irving Pageant.
A positive story about the power of faith and forgiveness.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500329709
Page Count: 62
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
