by Matt Kellum ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 12, 2016
A mature, compassionate religious guide.
A Christian debut self-help book that uses the metaphor of a mirror to illustrate its advice on spiritual growth.
Kellum is a physical therapist, a former combat veteran, and a lifelong Christian, and he intersperses his theological insights with anecdotes from his life and work. He employs a mirror as an allegory to expand upon the ideas of a believer seeing, being reflected, and assessing truth as he or she pursues a deeper relationship with God. Fifteen chapters cover variations on this theme, such as being plunged into darkness, being seduced by superficial appearances, or finding out unattractive secrets. There are two exercises in the text that emphasize Kellum’s central ideas, urging readers to list what obscures their spiritual sight, and to list the people that they’ve helped or neglected. A study guide at the end of the book provides questions that are linked to specific sets of chapters. These questions are quite sophisticated (such as “Remaining teachable is an essential trait….Discuss why we tend to rebuke the teacher (and God) before receiving the message”) and require both a solid knowledge of Scripture and an honest assessment of self. Kellum is also specific and pragmatic when discussing temptation and the means to resist it. This book does characterize atheists and followers of non-Christian religions as alienated and misled, but it also provides sound advice, advancing a healthy spirituality that neither shames its readers nor dodges biblical principles. Kellum doesn’t overdo the mirror metaphor, either; instead, he creatively uncovers various aspects of it that are relevant to the Bible and to everyday life. Unlike many testimonials, his personal stories are consistently fresh, humorous, and touching.
A mature, compassionate religious guide.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-5995-2
Page Count: 122
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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