Proclaims the author’s heartfelt views on God while also espousing intolerance.
A collection of 365 personal Christian meditations from debut author Rinehart.
Rinehart explains that she has developed a daily routine of drinking coffee, reading devotional books, and writing down her thoughts on what she has read. These thoughts tended to turn into Facebook posts, which she collected for this book. The author explains that all of God’s love is “meant to go through us and on to others as we share what we’ve found.” And so she shares her thoughts on the importance of maintaining a personal relationship with God and acting as an ambassador for Christ, even during one’s daily routines. The author is a gardener and a grandmother, and her passages reflect on tending everything from her garden to children. In all matters, she says, “We have to trust and run to God.” Not all of the mediations are positive, cloudless fare. Rinehart expresses her distaste for political correctness and the ways in which “Satan is turning our government and judges against Christians.” The guide’s Facebook-post origins are evident; i.e., the opinions expressed seem lightly considered. Is it true that the government is turning “against Christians,” or was this perhaps a hasty response to some news item of the day? Opinions about same-sex marriage are more reactionary than thoughtful. For example, the author contends that God allows “poverty and even famine” because there are laws within the U.S. that allow same-sex marriage. The work as a whole is clearly true to the author, and the daily meditations move quickly. Each selection is rarely more than a few paragraphs long, and whatever the reader’s opinion on one, there is soon another, with the majority expressing concepts like the importance of studying Scripture and the reassuring acceptance of God’s love.
Proclaims the author’s heartfelt views on God while also espousing intolerance.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973614-60-9
Page Count: 382
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
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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