A joyful assertion of the rewards of a one-to-one relationship with Jesus Christ.
A series of reflections on the nature of Christian faith.
Eriksson’s debut takes the form of a series of enthusiastic affirmations of the joys and challenges of Christian life, which she characterizes not as a system of doctrines, but as a living relationship with Jesus Christ. The Jesus she envisions is not a distant, celestial savior but rather an intimate guide and mentor, “who made each person individually, who knows us by name, cares about our personal circumstances and will move in miracles to change them and make a way for us.” She uses a familiar tactic of Christian apologetics, asserting that God allows tragedies and trials in order to test and strengthen the faith of his followers. However, readers may find the concept of an all-powerful, compassionate deity who still allows suffering to be deeply counterintuitive. The author compensates for such quandaries by presenting an attractively simple, straightforward picture of active Christian faith—one in which Jesus’ life as a human being on Earth enables him to empathize with his followers completely: “We don’t have to tell Jesus through our tears what a broken heart feels like,” she movingly writes. “He knows.” She follows a standard evangelical line by insisting that the cornerstone of a successful relationship with Jesus is total surrender, “turning the reins and leadership/decision-making of our lives entirely over to Him,” reasoning that if his followers shy away from complete devotion to him in this life, they can’t expect complete devotion from him in the next. Eriksson’s writing is quite clear and accessible overall. However, there are occasional errors; the husband of Mary’s cousin Elizabeth, for example, was Zechariah, not Zacheus. That said, the book will still be very useful to new Christians and to Christian faith groups.
A joyful assertion of the rewards of a one-to-one relationship with Jesus Christ.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4984-4848-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 3, 2015
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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