A persuasive religious treatise with sensible financial advice.
An account of the biblical position on financial matters, coupled with a practical guide to personal money management.
According to debut author and former college professor Davis, money is the “most discussed topic in the Bible,” although, he says, there’s confusion regarding its teachings on the subject. Some argue that Scripture extols a life of abundance, understood as material prosperity, but the author contends the only abundance that matters is that of a spiritual nature. Money, he asserts, is not necessarily good or bad, but a mere “tool and a test of where our hearts are”; however, he says that the love of money is “detestable in God’s sight,” and that the pursuit of it can disfigure one’s soul: “But there is something about it—or rather about us, our sin nature—that makes us want to crave it, to hoard it, to accumulate it, and to do crazy things to get more of it.” Davis avers that it’s helpful to remember that nothing is ever truly ours—asserting all things belong to the Lord—and that one’s life shouldn’t be devoted to the accumulation of ephemeral things. Nevertheless, one shouldn’t live in anxious financial insecurity, he says—so he provides sound and lucid, if not groundbreaking, counsel regarding the debt management, savings, and investment. His principal goal is to teach readers how to think about money in terms of one’s overall mission on Earth. Overall, his rendering of Scripture is thoughtful and textually rigorous, and it should be helpful to Christians who are interested in situating their financial lives within their religious commitments. His prose can sometimes be didactic to the point of condescension, however; for example, many readers will tire of his many rhetorical questions, such as “Am I right?” Also, it’s not clear that notions such as retirement and stock diversification require biblical support, even for the most faithful. Still, Davis supplies a theological argument about the nature of wealth that’s both reasonable and exegetically meticulous.
A persuasive religious treatise with sensible financial advice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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