A vivid, if uneven, faith account by a charismatic preacher.
A passionate exhortation of fundamentalist Christianity from a teenage evangelist.
In this nonfiction debut, Wilkerson (with co-author Clower) provides readers with a collection of stirring homilies and speeches of the sort that have earned him a large following on social media. His message, stated in the three-word title, is simplicity itself. Christians seeking salvation, he asserts, must surrender themselves entirely to Jesus and his teachings. Wilkerson admits no shades of gray in this interpretation: “The devil has a will for your life and if you are doing his will then you are not doing God’s will,” he says. “There is no middle ground.” The rhetoric he uses in this book is equal measures urgent and incantatory, with some exaggerated statements that may be familiar to attendees of big-tent revivals. For instance, Wilkerson regularly makes allowance for clerical donations; God, he writes, “beckons those who He has blessed with monetary wealth to abandon our right to it and be willing to use it to assist those who are going into all the world to preach the gospel to every creature.” (The New Testament makes no specific mention of providing money for itinerant preachers.) He also characterizes Jesus as doing something that had never been done before—“He would defy the laws of man to proclaim the laws of God”—when Old Testament prophets did this, as well. Still, Wilkerson’s account rings with his clear dedication to spreading the Gospel overseas: “While the only risk most of us take is the possibility of being pulled over for speeding to get to church on time,” he notes, “there are thousands who risk their occupations, reputations, and even lives for the sake of Christ.” Christian readers will likely be touched by this young author’s zeal.
A vivid, if uneven, faith account by a charismatic preacher.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-9577-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2018
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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