A valuable and convincing combination of devotional handbook and parenting survival guide.
A Christianity-infused manual delivers advice to parents coping with the upheavals of raising children.
Knowles begins her debut book at the end of her parenting journey. The oldest of her three kids was ready to go off to college, where he would get a degree, find a terrific job, marry a wonderful person, and be followed in that same pattern by his younger brother and sister in short order. Things would proceed smoothly, and the author and her husband would have finally successfully navigated their children’s perilous teenage years. And although Knowles decides to keep the specifics private (a curiously courtly decision that lends an extra degree of moral authority to the account), she then makes it clear that this neat, orderly picture never really happened. Her relations with her kids became dark and complicated—and, inadvertently, resulted in a prolonged learning experience that served to deepen the author’s faith. At first, this experience was rocky; the events occurring in her life didn’t seem to align with what she knew about God’s words and Christian Scripture. But eventually she came to a different understanding, guided by Peter’s sentiment of casting all one’s cares onto God. From these struggles flow all of the book’s useful insights into building better relationships, from individuals appreciating the concept of forgiveness (Knowles reminds her Christian readers that forgiveness is given not to the offending person but to God, who commands it) to parents reconciling themselves to the loss of “might have been”-style dreams for themselves and their children. The author writes all of this in a clear, straightforward prose that can look deceptively simple; Knowles packs a lot of hard-won wisdom into a comparatively small page count. Her sage advice to her fellow parents going through rough times with their kids boils down to urging them to have courage, regardless of the circumstances. Christian parents will find a great deal of worthy counsel in these lessons.
A valuable and convincing combination of devotional handbook and parenting survival guide.Pub Date: April 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973610-79-3
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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