An annotated innovation on the psalms of King David.
A short, passionate “psalm” of one Christian’s personal faith.
During a boring day at her property-management job in 1996, Phelps decided to write out a “letter” to God that she’d long contemplated—a personal “psalm” that she typed up and filed away in a binder. Years later, on a sleepless night, she says that she heard God tell her to publish it, resulting in this quick little volume. The psalm itself is only 12 paragraphs long, a deeply personal and widely allusive statement of faith. It’s a collection of assertions of her certainty in the power of God and the mercy of Jesus Christ, typically conveyed in lines such as, “As I walk through life I walk in Christ Jesus, and I can do all things in him who strengthens me.” Phelps makes clear that although her work was an exercise in compositional inspiration, it was also grounded in years of textual study. In the book’s most interesting feature, she lays out a detailed chart of the textual influences on her work: “the Lord brought a picture to my mind of a cross reference,” she writes. “I thought of putting this into an excel format so that those reading it would know this isn’t just me talking, but the Holy Spirit.” Her fellow devout Christians are clearly her intended audience, and she offers them a brief discussion of the nature of Christian faith. She also has some intriguing, if underdeveloped, things to say about living a religious life (“At the end of the day, Christians aren’t “perfect”, just forgiven”) and traces her psalm’s terms, such as “Abba,” “Bride of Christ,” and “the Elect,” to precise Scriptural chapter and verse. The quotes are sometimes-extensive, and the chart itself is a fascinating work of reference; it’s similar to those found in some Bible concordances but superior to most of them in its quote-selection skill. Bible-study groups may get through the psalm itself fairly quickly, but the chart will give them hours of fruitful work.
An annotated innovation on the psalms of King David.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-145753-935-0
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The memoir of George Dawson, who learned to read when he was 98, places his life in the context of the entire 20th century in this inspiring, yet ultimately blighted, biography. Dawson begins his story with an emotional bang: his account of witnessing the lynching of a young African-American man falsely accused of rape. America’s racial caste system and his illiteracy emerge as the two biggest obstacles in Dawson’s life, but a full view of the man overcoming the obstacles remains oddly hidden. Travels to Ohio, Canada, and Mexico reveal little beyond Dawson’s restlessness, since nothing much happens to him during these wanderings. Similarly, the diverse activities he finds himself engaging in—bootlegging in St. Louis, breaking horses, attending cockfights—never really advance the reader’s understanding of the man. He calls himself a “ladies’ man” and hints at a score of exciting stories, but then describes only his decorous marriage. Despite the personal nature of this memoir, Dawson remains a strangely aloof figure, never quite inviting the reader to enter his world. In contrast to Dawson’s diffidence, however, Glaubman’s overbearing presence, as he repeatedly parades himself out to converse with Dawson, stifles any momentum the memoir might develop. Almost every chapter begins with Glaubman presenting Dawson with a newspaper clipping or historical fact and asking him to comment on it, despite the fact that Dawson often does not remember or never knew about the event in question. Exasperated readers may wonder whether Dawson’s life and his accomplishments, his passion for learning despite daunting obstacles, is the tale at hand, or whether the real issue is his recollections of Archduke Ferdinand. Dawson’s achievements are impressive and potentially exalting, but the gee-whiz nature of the tale degrades it to the status of yet another bowl of chicken soup for the soul, with a narrative frame as clunky as an old bone.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-50396-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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