A starkly direct but sometimes-puzzling series of Christian reflections and exhortations.
A debut faith memoir delivers an emphatic and unusual perspective.
In his book, Gonzalez lays out his religious credential right at the outset. In the spring of 1994, while he was a student at City College of San Francisco, he claims he had “a real-life, physical encounter with the being known as the Creator.” The memory of this face-to-face meeting naturally changed the author’s life and filled him with an unshakeable confidence in his own faith —an assurance he’s eager to impart to his readers. “If you have ever wondered if the Creator of the universe exists and if He is even real,” he writes, “I am here to tell you that He is very real and really does exist because I have personally met Him, and it has changed my life.” This account sets the tenor for the rest of the work, in which Gonzalez relates his many subsequent interactions with the Christian God and offers advice and encouragement to readers seeking such dealings themselves. Building on the fervor of that initial encounter, the book presents a series of exhortations and insights into the nature of the Christian experience. The author outlines three basic steps to creating a more direct communication with God—pray regularly, read the Bible, and keep the Creator always in mind—and he elaborates on this program in short, clearly written chapters of easygoing prose filled with plenty of personal ruminations. Some of Gonzalez’s descriptions of his subsequent divine encounters may strike some readers as almost comically trivial—a gate "miraculously opened up for me right before my eyes" during a train trip from Oakland to San Francisco (the author compares the event to the parting of the Red Sea). Occasionally, they’re more baffling (God "allowed" an injury to the hand Gonzalez’s father used to beat his children instead of simply changing the man’s heart and leaving him unharmed). But the author’s call to selfless service will resonate even with readers who may doubt the particulars of its origin story.
A starkly direct but sometimes-puzzling series of Christian reflections and exhortations.Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-973653-95-0
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2020
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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