Honest and soulful insight from a gifted writer.
In this wise and tender inspirational book, a Michigan pastor shares meditations that speak to the gamut of life’s emotions.
Vredeveld’s debut offers meditations on a wide range of topics. Early on, the United Church of Christ pastor reveals that she’s walked through serious suffering herself, since her youngest daughter died of ovarian cancer at 28. With kindness, some humor and an exceptionally warm voice, the author takes readers from the shores of Lake Michigan and sightings of her beloved blue herons to the hospital rooms and bedsides of the sick and dying. Yet this is a book brimming with hope. Grief is only one of the topics, which sometimes include discussions of the broader culture. The author calls gossip “a form of character assassination” and verbal abuse “a form of identity theft.” In a chapter titled “Hurry Up and Wait,” she offers original thoughts on something as quotidian as waiting for a technician to show up at her house. It’s refreshing to read someone who so values positive thinking—“Be less interested in what bugs you about people than in what you appreciate about them”—and her trust in God, appreciation for life and love of nature are frequent themes. The author is also a singer and fan of hymns, and she beautifully weaves some of these lyrics into her writing. Readers may be tripped up by the occasional omission of a word, but the meaning is always clear from context. Not every grieving parent is up to the task of writing about such a loss in a way that will speak to others. Vredeveld does so quite well, however, and the few chapters focused on her daughter are not so personal that they will fail to speak to and comfort others. In fact, interested readers may find themselves wanting more.
Honest and soulful insight from a gifted writer.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1458212146
Page Count: 160
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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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