A strongly worded and empathetic call for Christians to accept “the counsel of God” in all things.
A debut Christian manual exhorts believers to put their total trust in God.
Smith’s passionately written book features a series of hard-won spiritual lessons and insights revolving for the most part around what the author sees as the material world’s inherent tendency to distract and deceive. Christians, she urges, must always strive to utilize a different kind of seeing—they should navigate through the temptations and degradations of the world using not the gauge of normal life, but an all-encompassing trust in God’s guidance. “When we are focused on Him, we are free to walk and exercise the equipping that we receive from Him,” Smith writes. “Keeping our thoughts focused on Him is faith in action because we are placing our trust in Him and not walking by what we see.” As God’s children, she insists, believers should be motivated and led by the Holy Spirit in their spiritual journeys through a fallen realm beset with “a host of hassles.” The author frankly acknowledges the complex modern world and its demands, but her emphasis throughout her book is on imploring her fellow Christians to rely on God to overcome those difficulties. One of the main strengths of Smith’s faith narrative is its sympathy; she returns often to the fallible experiences of her readers in which they may feel sorely tried, as though they were standing alone in a godless society. In countering these emotions, she uses personal convictions and well-chosen Scriptural quotations to remind her readers that “God works from within” and that therefore, the inner dimension is the place to start in renewing the strength of their faith. She advocates focusing on the “still small voice” that can steer readers even when they feel most forsaken. Many of these encouragements are standard fare for Christian guides of this type, but they’re no less powerful for their familiarity when they’re presented this energetically.
A strongly worded and empathetic call for Christians to accept “the counsel of God” in all things.Pub Date: June 27, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8921-8
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2017
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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