A short pamphlet delivers inspirational Christian motivations.
Fisher’s nonfiction debut offers a brief, tightly packed compendium of encouragements for readers who feel themselves overstressed by the modern world or adrift by personal problems, “shipwrecked by the storms of life,” and in need of some helpful advice. Her quick, 30-day cycle of chapters is designed to help readers find their inner power sources and channel that force through the serenity of daily meditation to alter their lives for the better, replacing fear, anger, and guilt with forgiveness, faith, love, and joy. Each “day” of her handbook consists of two or three quick paragraphs of thought about some aspect of life—the death of a loved one, the loss of certainty, the failure of health—and then a bullet-pointed clarifying resolution for readers, maxims of assurance or uplift intended to help them make “lofty choices rising out of the mud of hatred and self-indulgence.” One of Fisher’s repeated emphases involves the concept of helping readers find their own personal spiritual purposes and stick to them. She wants them always to ask, “Have I taken the time to define my purpose?”—and the path in all such cases is for believers to put their trust in God (the volume’s target audience obviously, but it gently excludes non-Christians and atheists). Many of the ruminations turn on Christian commonplaces like the pious trio of Faith, Hope, and Love, but the book’s plain and passionate diction mostly saves it from feeling derivative. These may be simple observations and encouragements, but they’re clearly held in complete sincerity. And the gist of these pages is not in any way passive—the faithful are reminded consistently that change will only come about as a result of their own efforts: “We do have a road map if we want to do the work,” the author writes. But, she notes, the infinite energy source of the divine that each believer can tap into makes the work of self-improvement easier, even joyful at times.
A worthy, day-by-day guided devotional for Christian meditation.
Pub Date: June 3, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 61
Publisher: Pyramid Collections
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
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.
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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