A frank but familiar account of an extensive spiritual odyssey.
A man recounts his long road to spiritual maturity, a journey marked by a gruesome accident, in this memoir.
Trotter had all the worldly trappings of conventional success: wealth and its appurtenances, an accomplished career as an entrepreneur, and a happy family. But he experienced a tedious absence of complete fulfillment, a discontentment he could not comprehensively articulate. In the troubled wake of the author’s divorce, that sense of dissatisfaction intensified, and finally he took the advice of his eldest daughter, Amy, to seek solace and guidance in his Christian faith. Trotter began to read the Bible regularly—he calls it a “central component of my life”—and started to frequent church as well. He even had a mystical experience during a religious retreat, a vision that left him “trembling in awe.” Still, the culminating moment of his spiritual development came in 2012 while he was on a hunting expedition on the plains of South Africa. He was charged and gruesomely mauled by a Cape buffalo, a beast so dangerous it has earned the moniker Black Death. Abrie, the professional hunter leading the safari, subsequently said he saw the author bathed in a column of light and an angel overhead “boxing the horns of the beast.” In his heartfelt book, Trotter, with impressive candor and unabashed emotion, denotes this as his turning point, the event that finalized his utter devotion to God. This lucid story of spiritual enlightenment offers some rich and thought-provoking details that many Christians will find comforting. But ultimately, this is a familiar, even formulaic account of finding God in the detritus of catastrophe. Even the crucial lesson—openness and submission to God and the complete authority of the Bible—won’t surprise believers or persuade skeptics. In addition, the author writes with a self-confidence that rules out philosophical circumspection: “Why can’t we experience the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth as Jesus asked us to pray in the Lord’s Prayer? The answer is, of course, we can.”
A frank but familiar account of an extensive spiritual odyssey.Pub Date: July 19, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-69870-215-5
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.
An insider’s chronicle of a pivotal presidential campaign.
Several months into the mounting political upheaval of Donald Trump’s second term and following a wave of bestselling political exposés, most notably Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin on Joe Biden’s health and late decision to step down, former Vice President Harris offers her own account of the consequential months surrounding Biden’s withdrawal and her swift campaign for the presidency. Structured as brief chapters with countdown headers from 107 days to Election Day, the book recounts the campaign’s daily rigors: vetting a running mate, navigating back-to-back rallies, preparing for the convention and the debate with Trump, and deflecting obstacles in the form of both Trump’s camp and Biden’s faltering team. Harris aims to set the record straight on issues that have remained hotly debated. While acknowledging Biden’s advancing decline, she also highlights his foreign-policy steadiness: “His years of experience in foreign policy clearly showed….He was always focused, always commander in chief in that room.” More blame is placed on his inner circle, especially Jill Biden, whom Harris faults for pushing him beyond his limits—“the people who knew him best, should have realized that any campaign was a bridge too far.” Throughout, she highlights her own qualifications and dismisses suggestions that an open contest might have better served the party: “If they thought I was down with a mini primary or some other half-baked procedure, I was quick to disabuse them.” Facing Trump’s increasingly unhinged behavior, Harris never openly doubts her ability to confront him. Yet she doesn’t fully persuade the reader that she had the capacity to counter his dominance, suggesting instead that her defeat stemmed from a lack of time—a theme underscored by the urgency of the book’s title. If not entirely sanguine about the future, she maintains a clear-eyed view of the damage already done: “Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government…something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.”
A determined if self-regarding portrait of a candidate striving to define herself and her campaign on her own terms.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781668211656
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2025
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