A thorough study of prophecy narrowly construed for a fairly thin audience of faithful.
A systematic analysis and exhortation of the prophecies found in the King James Bible, particularly the New Testament.
Haffenden, a Pentecostal churchgoer in his early 80s, dedicates his nonfiction debut to a passionately detailed deconstruction of the various prophetic texts in the Bible, his strongly voiced preference being for the King James Version. Haffenden considers these prophecies to be a kind of blueprint for spiritual survival when the present-day “church age” comes to its foretold end and ushers in the various stages of the end times adumbrated in the book of Revelation. “God in His great wisdom and providence has graciously given us guidelines as to how we can know and possess the truth about our conduct during the church age, the rapture, the great tribulation, and the remaining prophecies,” Haffenden says. Only the Holy Spirit knows the heavenly mind behind the biblical prophecies, and Haffenden claims to know this in the most direct means possible: “I have often received illuminations from God while studying His Holy Word,” he says; “the Holy Spirit would suddenly open my eyes, ears, and discernment to let me fully understand certain Scriptures.” While this raises problems for Christians who might read Haffenden’s book and disagree with his scriptural interpretations, it nevertheless lends his exegesis a headlong immediacy that infuses eye-opening clarity into his readings of such biblical texts as Isaiah and Ezekiel and Thessalonians. Along the way, Haffenden details the present-day signs among us that indicate the coming of the end, the tribulation, the rapture and the second coming. Jesus Christ, he says, is the basis for the “unfailing hope” available for Christians, and it’s by the faith and grace of God that his readers’ “spiritual eyes, ears, and discernment become alive and sensitized to God and His Word.” Jesus becomes more and more prominent in the course of the book as the great hope of the church, although Haffenden calmly asserts that this hope is only available to his fellow born-again Christians.
A thorough study of prophecy narrowly construed for a fairly thin audience of faithful.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490850474
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 6, 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
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