An intriguing story that colorfully illustrates one couple’s spiritual journey and the path we all must take to find our way.

WALKING FOR PEACE

AN INNER JOURNEY

In their first novel, Dojeiji and Agraso take readers through the story of their fascinating pilgrimage while offering a glimpse of their unique spiritual, physical and emotional journey.

Dojeiji and Agraso’s book details their walking journey for peace from Rome to Jerusalem. But instead of proclaiming world peace, as one might expect, Dojeiji and Agraso offer their personal pursuits for inner peace and spiritual discovery. The trip also entertains when featuring the daily grind of walking every day for more than a year and the people and places the couple sees. Dojeiji, as narrator, tells of her tales with her friend-turned-boyfriend-turned-fiancé, Agraso, and the trails and countries they walked through, the monasteries and churches they slept in as well as the draining emotional and physical demands that eventually made their walk less pleasant. The budding romance that develops between Dojeiji and Agraso keeps the story even more intriguing. Although the walk is entertaining, the spiritual journey is also deep, complex and unique. The journey takes the two far from common spiritual thought; readers are given insight into Dojeiji and Agraso’s thoughts as they come to believe in the power within themselves and the power to change circumstances through positive thinking and energy. For those not familiar with free-thinking religion—which includes Agraso taking up wizardry and Dojeiji struggling to find her place—it may be difficult to comprehend. Although their exact thoughts on God and Jesus Christ are occasionally hard to pinpoint, the message in the book is clear. Through their long walk from Rome to Jerusalem, the two discover that peace starts within each person.

An intriguing story that colorfully illustrates one couple’s spiritual journey and the path we all must take to find our way.

Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2011

ISBN: 978-1614347101

Page Count: 292

Publisher: Booklocker.com, Inc.

Review Posted Online: March 1, 2012

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If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

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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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...

NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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