A bush pilot relates his many encounters with his guardian angel in Alaska.
Bingman’s debut book is a fast-paced and ultimately winning combination of backwoods adventure yarns and personal faith journey centering on his audacious life as a bush pilot, fisherman, and jack-of-all-trades in the Alaskan wilderness. But the heart of the work is his accounts of his relationship with an angel simply named Joe. The escapades are told with smooth storytelling confidence that should appeal to armchair sports enthusiasts. The author comes from a family of pilots and risk-takers and he gives the impression of having found his real spiritual home in the Alaskan woods, where so many aviators have lived before him. “The back country of Alaska,” he tells his readers, “is riddled with twisted metal that once flew to that very spot and is now just someone’s story, slowly fading away.” But Bingman’s own tales are set apart by the presence of Joe, who turns up for conversations and moments of insight and almost always gives the author a feeling of companionship he wants to share with his readers. He hopes readers will “reflect on subtle miracles that have happened in your life and, with God’s help, start to realize that you are never truly alone.” Christian audiences will no doubt find some of Bingman’s Joe stories familiar to their own experiences, although more skeptical readers will likely wonder about some of the details. For instance, when a charging bear changes course at the last minute in the Ugashik district, the author thanks Joe “for being there for me when I needed him most.” But the angel makes no appearance in the tale—he just gets the credit. Such conveniences are common in this kind of faith recounting, and Bingman folds them so seamlessly into his personal reflections that even the most secular readers should find them easy reading.
A thoroughly engaging account of a modern-day adventurer in the Alaskan backcountry—with spiritual elements mixed in.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973610-39-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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