Best for readers already familiar with and fascinated by Jesus’ life.
Richey’s (Knowing the Gospel, 2011) latest work of nonfiction illustrates her devotion to Christianity and offers readers a deeper insight into the Gospels.
Careful research and a devotion to her faith shape Richey’s latest endeavor, which she offers as a means for readers to become better acquainted with the teachings of Jesus Christ. The book chronologically follows the way in which civilization anticipated and experienced the incarnation of Jesus as a man, through his childhood and three years of active teaching before his crucifixion. Richey diligently includes documentation from several different Bibles to support her theologies. However, while the multiple citations are meant to supply readers with a deeper understanding of significant passages in the Bible, they often confuse Richey’s interpretations. The strongest components of this text are Richey’s commitments to her faith and to sharing with readers a closer understanding of Jesus’ life. Yet choosing to quote the same passage from various versions of the Bible leaves little room for a reader to bring his or her own impression to the work. For example, Richey will open many paragraphs with a statement—i.e., “As a prophet, Jesus preached or spoke God’s word and performed miracles like the great Old Testament prophets”—followed by quotes from different Bibles as supporting text, all the while rarely pointing out anything specific that readers could use to further analyze the argument or hold as evidence of its thesis. A person of faith will find the cross-referencing valuable if interested in multiple versions of religious texts, but the technique comes up short as a means of educating the lay reader.
Best for readers already familiar with and fascinated by Jesus’ life.Pub Date: April 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475150766
Page Count: 116
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.
An examination of how the U.S. can revitalize its commitment to freedom.
In this ambitious study, Snyder, author of On Tyranny, The Road to Unfreedom, and other books, explores how American freedom might be reconceived not simply in negative terms—as freedom from coercion, especially by the state—but positive ones: the freedom to develop our human potential within sustaining communal structures. The author blends extensive personal reflections on his own evolving understanding of liberty with definitions of the concept by a range of philosophers, historians, politicians, and social activists. Americans, he explains, often wrongly assume that freedom simply means the removal of some barrier: “An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.” In his careful and impassioned description of the profound implications of this conceptual limitation, Snyder provides a compelling account of the circumstances necessary for the realization of positive freedom, along with a set of detailed recommendations for specific sociopolitical reforms and policy initiatives. “We have to see freedom as positive, as beginning from virtues, as shared among people, and as built into institutions,” he writes. The author argues that it’s absurd to think of government as the enemy of freedom; instead, we ought to reimagine how a strong government might focus on creating the appropriate conditions for human flourishing and genuine liberty. Another essential and overlooked element of freedom is the fostering of a culture of solidarity, in which an awareness of and concern for the disadvantaged becomes a guiding virtue. Particularly striking and persuasive are the sections devoted to eviscerating the false promises of libertarianism, exposing the brutal injustices of the nation’s penitentiaries, and documenting the wide-ranging pathologies that flow from a tax system favoring the ultrawealthy.
An incisive, urgently relevant analysis of—and call to action on—America’s foundational ideal.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9780593728727
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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