A prayer journal that lacks polish and an effective presentation.
Pollitt offers 500 prayers to God in this Christian volume.
With hundreds to choose from, this debut book contains prayers for all manner of situations and times of difficulty. No table of contents or thematic index is present to guide the potential supplicant, however: Pollitt advises readers to pray before opening this journal so that Jesus will help them select the specific invocation they need that day. Each page begins with a prayer, opening, like a letter, with “Dearest Jesus” and ending with “Thank you Jesus, Amen.” The prayers differ in tone, purpose, and language. Some seek to replicate the formal language of the King James Bible: “Show unto me the beauty and hidden fruits of the spirit in all your holy chosen people and bridle my tongue with angels.” Others are composed in a more contemporary register: “You turned the water into wine, four jugs, 200% pure, changed my income.” Some are curiously specific: “Lord Jesus, thank you for your mighty supernatural matchless power, show unto me new stuff at my present family business.” The majority of each page is given over to blank lines, which are marked as “Sacred space to write your visions on how this prayer has blessed or changed your life.” There are enough lines in these sections that most readers should be able to use the prayers more than once before filling up the space. The fact that Pollitt managed to compose so many discrete prayers is indeed impressive. Even so, the categorization of the devotions and the journaling space beneath them as “sacred” feels a bit exploitative considering how lazily the book is formatted (prayers and lines from one page frequently encroach onto the next) and how many typos are present in the text (“Jobe” instead of Job). While the journaling aspect of the book is intriguing, it casts the act of prayer in transactional terms that some religious readers will likely find gauche. Those looking for daily pre-written prayers can certainly find better crafted alternatives elsewhere, either online or published in volumes smaller than a math textbook.
A prayer journal that lacks polish and an effective presentation.Pub Date: March 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4984-6732-2
Page Count: 508
Publisher: Xulon Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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