A gentle romance peppered with homespun expressions of faith in action, which will satisfy readers who trust in the Lord.
In her first novel, Abersold, who co-pastors an Alabama church with her husband, shows Christian prayer and faith at work in a small Missouri town.
In this folksy story that starts in 1959, widowed preacher Esther “Essie” Cox loves the Lord, her nondenominational congregation and her teenage daughter, Ruth “Ruthie” Ann. Sweet-voiced, class valedictorian Ruthie brings both grief and joy to her protective mother. After Ruthie, who has never been kissed, sneaks out with friends and meets slightly older Buddy, “feelings she never realized she could feel” sweep over her. “God or no God, I plan to spend the rest of my life with Buddy Nelson,” she resolves. “He and I will leave this God-forsaken place together and find true happiness.” Buddy, a self-described drifter, wants nothing to do with churches after growing up with his preacher father, a “hell fire and brimstone” guy who stole offerings to buy booze. Buddy plans to return to his hometown of St. Louis soon; “Women,” he says, “you can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them.” Ruthie’s rebellion brings Essie grief that threatens to return her to the depression and floor-sobbing fits she suffered after Samuel—her husband and Ruthie’s father—died. Warm support from church members, including Sister Blue, Aunt Minnie and abused Susie Falcon, whose husband, Mike, wants Essie out of the pulpit, bring solace to Essie, as does her growing friendship with devout widower David Fisher. Prayers rise from almost every page as characters ask Jesus for help, and in response, the Lord speaks directly to them. Aunt Minnie reveals that Jesus told her, “Ruthie has chosen her will over His perfect will,” but she is still “a child of God” and “we must praise Him until He brings our Ruthie home.” Essie follows this advice and finds peace. Other romances, some surprising, blossom near the story’s end, but the final story remains to be told in future books in the series. As Christian romance, the book extends charity, love and forgiveness without stooping to vulgar sensationalism; think 50 tasteful shades of love. The story succeeds in portraying what the author imagines to be a simpler, cleaner life back in 1959, which may be too vanilla for some readers.
A gentle romance peppered with homespun expressions of faith in action, which will satisfy readers who trust in the Lord.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479762866
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2013
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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