A straightforward, faith-based story of reconstruction in the wake of trauma.
From being confined to a wheelchair to walking on her own, Lockamy recalls her journey of recovery after a near-fatal accident tested her strength and faith.
After dropping off her son at school, Lockamy was hit head-on by a driver in the opposite lane. Her car flipped over another car to land upside down on another vehicle and careen into a brick wall. Trapped in the twisted wreckage, Lockamy floated in and out of consciousness during the rescue process, overhearing that they were running out of time to save her pinned right ankle. Though medics were able to save her lower half, the damage was extensive enough that doctors said she would never walk again. During recovery, Lockamy’s sunny disposition helped her through circumstances that otherwise seemed dismal: legs mangled from the extraction, ankles and lower legs pieced together with rods and screws. Over the course of her recovery, she took literal baby steps until, at the close of the book, she walked on her own, with family and friends as witnesses. Lockamy’s tone strikes a balance between conversational and testimonial, mixing faith-based anecdotes with her mellow sense of humor. Because of her shifted perspective, Lockamy comes to certain realizations about humanity and connectedness: we are all at different points in our own processes of (re)construction, and we can never know whose lives we touch. Throughout the memoir, Lockamy weaves in excerpts from biblical stories she found inspiring: Daniel in the lions’ den and Noah building the Ark. For the most part, these passages testify to deep faith and renewal by focusing on God, but more analysis would better integrate them into the memoir as a whole.
A straightforward, faith-based story of reconstruction in the wake of trauma.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490855752
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2015
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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