Simple, if nongroundbreaking, reflections on asking for God’s help.
As a continuation of Carpenter’s debut, Spiritual Soul Train Ride (2016), this collection explores several Christians’ experiences with prayer.
On each “stop” of the soul train, an individual or group shares a unique story about ways that prayer has been helpful. We meet women who exercise and worship together, a couple that took a mission trip to Kenya, a woman who improved her disintegrating marriage, a music pastor with an active prayer life and a deep desire to serve God, and others. Several themes recur—the need to make time for reflection and prayer and the ability of God to bring a person direction, comfort, healing, and miraculous experiences. Each section includes a “Scripture Call” that highlights a relevant Bible passage and provides a blank space for readers to record their religious musings. Carpenter’s writing is lucid and uplifting: “God wants to hear all of our prayers, but then God wants us close enough to him so we listen and feel his will. As we advance, we will do less talking and more listening and praying to contemplate the will of God.” She has chosen her stories well, and the diverse participants—a Methodist minister, a Baptist farrier, a devout young college student, an elderly Catholic couple—make this guide appealing to a wide Christian audience. Some technical aspects need improvement, however; for example, some of the reflection sections need more space for readers to adequately record their thoughts, and the photographs should be placed near the corresponding text. The ideas in this book aren’t particularly original (pray often and for anything you stand in need of), but they might serve as a persuasive reminder to ask and perhaps receive.
Simple, if nongroundbreaking, reflections on asking for God’s help.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 57
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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