A well-written and welcoming take on the traditional tenets of Western religion.
A passionate rereading of Christianity and the nature of personal faith.
Canadian author Rozek’s debut takes the form of an enthusiastic top-to-bottom re-envisioning of the Christian mythos. Rozek cites such influences as C. S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters (1942), Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods (1970) and the Christian-mystic writings of Zecharia Sitchin as she goes back to the Bible with fresh eyes and reads it anew in search of the answers to basic questions such as “Why am I here?” or “What’s the purpose of life anyway?” She views these questions as central to “the game of life” and tells her readers, “To get to the ultimate level, we must play it seriously with all the skills we have.” The schema of quasi–Judeo-Christian faith she derives from her readings is personal and interactive. She reminds her readers that the Bible is full of references to heavenly interactions with the lives of humans, and in her view, this is a necessary thing. “Our world today still needs celestial intervention desperately.” That intervention comes about at the behest of “the Great Ones”—“a collection of benevolent, celestial God-beings: the Source, the Son and Spirit.” She also spends a good deal of time on forerunners and servants, the supernatural beings known as angels. Rozek’s conceptual revamping of traditional biblical ideas ultimately appeals to the well-known Christian narrative: Jesus died as a sacrifice and as a living key to redemption. “By accepting the death of this Great One as a ransom for our freedom,” Rozek writes, “each of us can belong to something far greater than ourselves.” The book then broadens from this dramatized 21st-century recasting of the Messiah story to include some intriguingly wider suggestions for how the faithful of any denomination can find meaning: “The Great Ones know that in order for us to have abundant lives, we must first learn how to love.” Familiar concepts, sure, but Rozek’s unconventional perspective makes them seem invigoratingly new.
A well-written and welcoming take on the traditional tenets of Western religion.Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-9919917-0-9
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Books of Life Publishing House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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