An energetic, interactive guide that encourages Christians to love themselves in order to love others.
A short Christian meditation explores the nature of love and self-love.
“What is your definition of love?” Sandra asks in her nonfiction debut, laying out a call for embracing self-love as a foundation for pursuing a deeper bond with the Christian God. One big benefit of loving ourselves, according to the author, is that it allows us to “begin to accept ourselves for who we are in Christ.” We realize greater self-esteem when we welcome who we are, the book asserts, and “when we believe that we are entitled to greatness, purpose, and blessings, we demand it and receive it.” Each of the manual’s quick, clearly written chapters ends with a recap of its contents, a “proclamation” designed to help readers turn sentiments into actions, and a suggested activity to give form to those efforts. Sandra illustrates her points with quotes from Scripture and incidents from her own life and the lives of others, stressing the fine line between loving yourself and loving others in correct balance. “Love is bigger than you and me,” she writes. Loving someone means being “willing” to rank that person’s “happiness on the same level as your own.” And yet “love is helping one another without being abused; giving, but not being used!” This balancing act can sometimes be a problem for a philosophy of self-love, of course, as can be seen, for example, in that previous quote. Christians are explicitly instructed to love others even while being abused by them (Matthew 5:38-39, etc.). A similar difficulty arises when the author encourages readers to “celebrate your achievements. Acknowledge your feelings, forgive yourself, and then work on letting go so you can move on with your life.” There is a perennial conflict between modern self-help books urging self-love and Christian teachings advocating self-abnegation in service to others, and that clash isn’t solved or even addressed in this volume. What readers get instead is reassuring self-affirmation delivered in brisk prose.
An energetic, interactive guide that encourages Christians to love themselves in order to love others.Pub Date: July 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4990-6218-2
Page Count: 52
Publisher: XlibrisUS
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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