An uneven religious autobiography, but one that has some life-affirming stories to offer.
A debut spiritual study and memoir by a minister who seeks purpose and finds it in God.
Scott writes that, over the course of his life, he had been “an Episcopal priest, an inner city minister, and a headmaster, but [his] life purpose has never varied….Pursue Christ and encourage others.” His memoir relates how he attended high school and Yale University with future government leaders, such as John Kerry and George W. Bush, but several chance encounters with devoted Christians and church groups led him to abandon politics for a life dedicated to Jesus Christ. These encounters are only the first of many moments in which Scott says that he felt God leading him—from the seemingly smallest of decisions to a moment that he simply knew “the issue of marriage was settled” and began a serious relationship with his future wife. After seminary school, he suddenly felt the urge to call an acquaintance from years earlier who offered him his first job as a pastor. With this small flock, Scott saw the power of communication between believers, which contributed to finally answering his questions about the purpose of life. It also affected his decision to home-school his children and shelter them from mainstream popular culture, to found a Christian school, and most fascinatingly, to convert a prison in Atlanta into a center for the homeless. In his chapter on the last, Scott’s prose will have the biggest impact on readers. Throughout his book, he makes practical observations on love, married life, and parenthood that will be constructive and uplifting to Christian readers in difficult family relationships. However, many parts of the book lose momentum during Scott’s philosophizing; he also goes on underdeveloped tangents, such as accounts of his times in South America and East Germany. However, when he applies his scriptural interpretations to a concrete, engaging narrative, such as that of the prison conversion, they feel much more powerful and useful.
An uneven religious autobiography, but one that has some life-affirming stories to offer.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4610-5
Page Count: 124
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2016
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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