An inspiring and scripturally literate guide aimed at helping Christians overcome heartbreak.
A debut manual on heartache focuses on Christian worship.
In her slim, beautifully designed book, Brown is concerned with endings and how to survive them. Her main topic is the spectrum of sickening emotions that accompany the end of close relationships, especially hopelessness. “There is that gasp of ‘oh no,’ ” she writes, “that suffocating feeling that you will never breathe again and if you do, perhaps you’ll not have enough strength to finish that breath.” Her guide, which features stock photographs, looks at many kinds of endings, from failing marriages and loneliness to a general feeling of despair. In all cases, she is clearly writing to an audience of her fellow, ardent Christians when she counsels hope in their darkest hours. Each of her book’s short chapters starts with a poem by the author, continues with a concentrated (and scripturally grounded) meditation on some aspect of enduring a failed relationship or marriage, often drawing on Brown’s own personal experiences, and concludes with a prayer and some keynote biblical passages. There is no real, coherent narrative; readers can just as easily pick chapters at random as read from cover to cover. In each section, the author is both sympathetic and unsentimental, offering support but forbidding her readers to sugarcoat the past. “The nights are long and lonely now that he is not next to you,” she writes. “To be honest, there were times that you felt the same when he was there. But now you’re not only lonely but alone.” Brown’s fellow Christians are reminded that God does not intend for them to be miserable and that he will never desert them: “Father, help me to know that though all may leave me, you never will.” The author’s prose is sympathetically personal, and her tone, though realistic, is always optimistic: With God, even the most wretched believer can expect a brighter day. Forlorn Christians will find this a quick, uplifting read.
An inspiring and scripturally literate guide aimed at helping Christians overcome heartbreak.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973643-27-2
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2019
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
