A useful daily primer for Christian couples.
A month of Christian meditations aimed at structuring and strengthening romantic relationships.
Bergmann’s slim nonfiction debut, aimed squarely at fellow Christians, takes readers through 31 days of reflections on all aspects of relationships between men and women, reminding readers that “the first step is to look for someone whose heart is after God’s.” This idea is key to every aspect of the book; indeed, this is much less a study of how two people can perfect a relationship with each other and more a study of how, in the author’s view, a healthy relationship contours to three participants: a man, a woman, and God: “Everything we have, every opportunity given to us,” Bergmann writes, “is by His hand.” (Bergmann opens with a note asserting that the book will also appeal to single people by giving them a kind of relationship blueprint, but the book is clearly designed for married couples.) Readers are also continually warned by the author that Satan always lurks to do harm and pull people apart: “Satan enslaves us. Christ frees us,” he says. “Satan destroys our lives. Christ saves.” Many meditations, though, simply concentrate on the basics of any relationship, applicable to people of any faith: honesty, clear and enthusiastic communication, common courtesy. Couples are urged to control their tempers, not to be careless with words, and to curtail pointless, trust-sapping complaining. Bergmann uses a clear, sparse prose style throughout in elaborating these points, and each chapter is lavishly supplied with quotes from Scripture at every step. The author has many useful things to say about the dangers of egotism and anger, but the book’s main point is evangelical: The highest goal of every relationship, it says, is to make that relationship pleasing to God. Religious couples will likely find each of these meditations instructive.
A useful daily primer for Christian couples.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973607-38-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2018
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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