A heartfelt, accessible celebration of modern-day “saints.”
A self-professed ordinary woman's series of meditations for her fellow Christians.
The central aim of Edkins (Crumbs from the Master’s Table, 2015) in her stirring, straightforward new book is simple: “to develop an ever-increasingly deeper relationship with our heavenly Father.” She works toward this goal by addressing 12 short, fast-paced chapters to her fellow “saints,” urging them to give themselves over to God (“Submission is the key. He, Himself, and His—totally, completely surrendered”) and incorporate their faith into their daily lives. She stresses that she isn’t advocating joining a monastery; the lives of her “saints,” she says, will each glorify their God in his or her own way: “Saint,” she writes, “you are not there to earn a salary. His plan and purpose for you is greater than that.” This emphasis on individuality, which seems to conflict with a call for abject personal surrender, runs throughout the book, with Edkins repeatedly pointing out that it’s through the separate personalities of its “saints” that the community of faithful will prosper. “Pumping out carbon copies is easy,” she maintains, but the real miracle of Christian life is allowing God to produce “an original”: “In all the world there is one you and one me.” This focus extends, interestingly, to race as well, with a stern clarification that “There is no ‘black church’ or ‘white church’, there is only His church.” It’s accompanied by clear, no-nonsense declarations about how fully embracing a faithful life will forever change those who do it. Each chapter of Edkins’ bracing book ends with a “Recipe,” consisting of a lengthy quote from Scripture, and the author also includes many original prayers, custom-written around the themes she lays out. Although this isn’t a book for religious doubters, much less active skeptics, it will be a congenial reading experience for devout Christians.
A heartfelt, accessible celebration of modern-day “saints.”Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4828-0685-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Partridge Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2015
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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