An affecting faith memoir filled with inviting personal anecdotes.
One man’s account of his spiritual journey from confusion to a peaceful Christianity.
In his nonfiction debut, McAndrew looks back on the beginning of his spiritual journey, decades ago, when he was feeling a bit burnt out at the restaurant where he worked. Frazzled by his temperamental managers and spurred by a shocking tragedy that happened one night, he began what would become a lifelong search to understand “the invisible matrix of life that is God.” He increasingly interrogated the worldly assumptions of his life, guided by a new openness to put aside the doubts of the world and do as the Holy Spirit calls Christians to do: “walk out on the Sea of Life.” In order to do so, McAndrew writes, “we must let go of our doubts and fears, and trust the infinite oneness.” McAndrew describes this slow, sometimes-grudging process of growing spiritual freedom with a moving directness, relating family anecdotes involving his wife, Yvonne, and his wise-beyond-her-years daughter, Shavonne, with the flair of a novelist. All of it is meant to illustrate the familiar modern Christian adage, “When you get to your wit’s end, you will find God lives there.” McAndrew puts it simply, “That’s what happened to me.” The book’s confessional strengths are only slightly offset by its exegetical weaknesses. McAndrew writes, for instance, that in Genesis, “the primordial substance of the universe is light,” when the biblical text clearly states otherwise, or when he contends that a study of St. Peter’s words and actions shows that “trust in Spirit developed over time,” when precisely the opposite is the point of his sudden awakening on the night of Jesus’ arrest. But such quibbles don’t much distract from McAndrew’s larger message of surrendering worldly vanity to “the harmony of the Kingdom”; the book will provide younger Christians especially with an appealingly personal and spiritual version of the faith.
An affecting faith memoir filled with inviting personal anecdotes.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4602-2502-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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