A thoughtful, bighearted book of inspirational stories.
Cates (The Doorway to Hope, 2015, etc.) offers a book of devotions for practical Christians.
For some people, Christianity can often feel like a belief system that’s suitable only for the sanitized world of Sunday church pews; elsewhere, where life’s problems are messier than those found in homilies, faith can seem less applicable. Cates attempts to remedy that here in a book of devotions for Christians who are already acquainted with the grit of the wider world. These pieces, he says, are “meant to startle the reader from complacency, creating dialogues with aspects of ourselves and those we love that are controversial. In doing so, they are also meant to begin the process of healing.” Divided into sections on “Love,” “Diversity,” “Morality,” “Hope,” and “Holy Days,” the devotions are intended to be read one per week throughout the year. Each contains a “dialogue” or story followed by a passage from Scripture and a concluding discussion section that ties them together. Cates draws the stories generally from his own life, including his work as a therapist for troubled adolescents. Many are anecdotes about various people whom he’s encountered, from domestic terrorists to Amish sewing-circle members to defrocked Catholic priests. Cates is a talented storyteller, and his dialogues often delve into strange and surprising places. It helps that he’s led a life that’s varied enough to include so many engaging scenarios; more impressive, however, is the way that Cates manages to tie his stories in with his thematic material, probing the liminal spaces in which faith, theology, and human flaws sit uneasily beside one another: “I once heard ‘Amazing Grace’ sung at a Klan rally,” he recalls in one devotion, “to accompany the burning of three crosses. It occurred to me that God does love these people, regardless. It also occurred to me that I’m awfully glad I’m not God.” Readers seeking a less dogmatic, more empathetic discussion of Christianity—one truly concerned with the downtrodden, the marginalized, the needy, and the dispossessed—will find much of interest here. He writes about “those who have slashed their own raw edges into the psyches and live with these scars,” and his audience will likely include those who are similarly marked.
A thoughtful, bighearted book of inspirational stories.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5151-5320-7
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
