Ivey’s apologetics will convince few skeptics, but likeminded readers will find it a useful tool.
This daily devotional work offers the words of Jesus Christ as recorded in the Bible, along with commentary and suggested prayers.
As many other 365-day devotional guides have done previously, this book provides a biblical extract each day, a reflection on its meaning, and an accompanying prayer. Here, the quotations are limited to the words of Jesus, which, in some printings of the New Testament, are rendered in red lettering—hence the title. The quotations can be quite short, from a line or two to long passages that Ivey (Science, Philosophy, and Jesus Christ, 2015, etc.) discusses over several days. As in his previous works, Ivey aims to prove the truth of Scripture through Christian apologetics, “wherein one seeks hard evidence…that the message of the Bible is valid.” But the book’s notion of hard evidence seems suspect as an investigation that seeks only validity is an exercise in confirmation bias. The book cherry-picks evidence, for example, when it praises Albert Einstein’s understanding of space-time and writes that he “contributed massively to the apologetics of the Biblical God.” But in 1954, near the end of his life, Einstein wrote that “The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weaknesses, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends.” The book never grapples with such contradictions, nor does it seem to take other religions’ claims of truth seriously. It airily dismisses the entire edifice of Hinduism, for example, because “one can believe almost anything and call themselves a Hindu.” Ivey’s commentary, however, does offer some thoughtful insights that readers may appreciate; for example, when Jesus’ own family wants to speak to him while he’s preaching, he replies (in Luke 8:21), “My mother and my brothers are these who hear the word of God and do it.” Interestingly, Ivey sympathizes with the relatives, using the passage to talk about isolation; the accompanying prayer asks the Lord to “help us to realize that others may subsist in a world of loneliness that we perhaps could not bear.”
Ivey’s apologetics will convince few skeptics, but likeminded readers will find it a useful tool.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5393-0885-0
Page Count: 446
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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