A passionate, if familiar, Christian account.
A Christian woman examines her faith in this memoir.
At the beginning of her book, Deir-Boyette recalls living a settled and seemingly satisfying life in Jamaica: “I had a job with the Jamaican government, a newly built house in a gated community, and a payment-free Honda Accord.” But she wasn’t sure how she would pay for her son’s college tuition or what exactly she should do next when suddenly she had a religious experience. She recalls that Jesus told her to move to the United States. “I was not going to let others’ negative comments deter me,” she writes. “I trusted God, and my faith was reactivated.” The work consists of the author’s recounting of various incidents in her life in Jamaica and also in America with her husband and sons. The thread she winds throughout the narrative traces the ubiquitous, revelatory presence of her faith in day-to-day life. Readers of Christian memoirs will know much of what to expect from such a narrative, and Deir-Boyette doesn’t disappoint. Her personal involvement in her own faith is uniformly dramatic, and the general lessons she draws from specific events are always upbeat. More skeptical readers will notice that she virtually always ascribes divine causation to things that have obvious real-world reasons. A few months before her son started university in North Carolina, for instance, legislation lowered the tuition—the author calls it “God’s grace.” Deir-Boyette worked hard and eventually got a corner office and a new car, asserting, “Who but God? Hallelujah!” At one point, when the author told some neighbors that she regularly heard God’s voice, they responded that her story was “too weird,” and some of her skeptical readers might agree. But Deir-Boyette’s insistence throughout that her faith is a living thing and that Jesus walks with her every day are sentiments that many of her fellow fundamentalist Christians will share.
A passionate, if familiar, Christian account.Pub Date: April 20, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-63168-4
Page Count: 194
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: June 18, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
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