A friendly, uplifting manual that challenges Christians to deepen their beliefs.
A debut faith guide aims to help Christians find the path to Jesus.
Letkemann’s slim book melds a wide-ranging scriptural literacy with strong elements of autobiography to craft a series of meditations on many aspects of Christian life. The author reflects on her life with her husband, Jake, and her experiences in her own faith community. Throughout the narrative, the author presents herself in a relaxed, mostly nonjudgmental stance, casually mentioning recently reading one biblical passage or another. And several of the book’s core teachings are likewise appealingly informal, with Letkemann regularly advising her readers to enter a personal relationship with Jesus in order to renovate their spiritual lives. She stresses that God is in the details: The point of faith is intimacy. She learned this through gradual steps, at first mistakenly asking herself, “Is this problem big enough to ask for help, or should I just be quiet and handle it myself?” She urges readers to realize that to ask this kind of question is to miss the point about the ongoing revelation that a relationship with the Christian God should be. Some of this will be familiar to fundamentalist Christians, the notion of “let go and let God.” “When I’ve done all that God asked me to do, I release my faith and leave the rest to Him,” she writes. “Why not entrust it to the only One who can make a difference?” Scattered throughout the text are also the type of errors and debatable interpretations that such books often feature. For example, “God created every creature on earth in pairs,” Letkemann writes. At another point, she asserts that the Bible is “the source of over six hundred fulfilled prophecies, many of which are verifiable.” But the guide’s central question will be telling for any Christian reader: “If I was put on trial for believing in Jesus, would there be any evidence to convict me?” As the author warns her readers, if the answer is no, there’s a problem.
A friendly, uplifting manual that challenges Christians to deepen their beliefs.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4602-6334-1
Page Count: 252
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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