An experience-based Christian guide for overcoming turmoil through prayer and faith.
Power, a Christian mother, offers her first autobiography, a self-help book to provide solace to other Christian women in a difficult, challenging world.
As a young Christian woman, the author yearned to be married and have children. She dreamed of her perfect life married to the perfect man with whom she would have wonderful children. When her second child, daughter Charlie, died in childbirth, the trauma destroyed her dream, almost breaking Power apart. “It was one of those moments when time stands still,” Power writes of the suffering that almost destroyed her. God and her faith in Jesus pulled her through. In the first half of her book, Power fluidly shares her insights into how Christian women can face adversity, using the story of her own gradual emotional recovery from Charlie’s death as an example from which others might profit. Power portrays life as a battle, a familiar Christian metaphor. The Christian soldier, she says, must have a belt of truth, a breastplate of righteousness, a helmet of salvation, shoes of peace, the sword of God’s word, and a rousing battle cry to protect and inspire the warrior for truth. “In my battles, I have found that the devil will attack when I am alone,” Power writes. She gives particular advice to the exhausted and bereft so that they can regain their strength. The book shows a number of specific approaches in developing a conservative Christian response to hardship and restoring hope and healing for the weary. The second half provides the stories of other Christian women and how they have overcome life challenges through their faith. Power and the fellow storytellers she features—all of whom maintain a confessional tone—often refer to other authors and books they have found useful, and at the end of each chapter, she provides prayers written as letters to God as well as helpful study tools in the form of lists of questions derived from chapter content. Occasionally, the narrative feels redundant and maudlin, but throughout, Power nobly encourages other Christian women to tell their stories.
An experience-based Christian guide for overcoming turmoil through prayer and faith.Pub Date: June 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1462737109
Page Count: 200
Publisher: CrossBooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2014
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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