Unlikely to convert nonbelievers but thoroughly heartwarming nonetheless.
A mother recounts a series of fortunate events in this slim nonfiction debut.
Heartbroken over her son’s impending deployment to Iraq, Watson makes a solo trip from Texas to Florida to see him off. Initially certain that she won’t have the strength to say goodbye, she encounters numerous benevolent strangers, all offering her prayers and assistance. From a woman who comforts her as she cries through the flight home, to a man in uniform who prays for her son and then vanishes without a trace, the people Watson meets buoy her through the trip; she arrives home with her faith reaffirmed. “God’s grace,” she concludes, “was providing for me every step of the way and seeing me through the most difficult day of my life.” Readers of sound Christian faith will likely agree with Watson, and this earnest, well-written book succeeds as an inspirational text for those who are already believers. For skeptics, though, the author’s insistence that her resilience “had nothing to do with Leigh Watson or her own strength” can become irksome; it’s easy to view Watson’s experiences not as divine interventions but rather as examples of good people simply being nice. Regardless of whether the reader believes in genuine God-sent miracles, all but the most cynical will agree that this book is an uplifting showcase of true human kindness. The strangers who aid and console Watson behave with an uncomplicated decency that seems to be increasingly rare in everyday life. Watson’s book could be a quick spiritual pick-me-up for anyone looking for examples of love and kindness, divine or otherwise.
Unlikely to convert nonbelievers but thoroughly heartwarming nonetheless.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-1615077342
Page Count: 56
Publisher: CrossBooks
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2012
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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