A storyteller's account of the gifts of Christian faith.
Coldicutt’s debut is an intriguing mixture of fiction and memoir, beginning with her personal story of being a retired teacher and mother of four who had noticed for many years the sense of peace and happiness her Christian friends seemed to feel in their faith. “[Jesus] seemed so real to them,” she writes, “as if they’d just been talking to Him.” The blessings of the Christian faith revealed themselves to her in 1986: “After years of running my life on MY terms, I gave it to Jesus and asked Him if He would make a better job of it than I had done.” In the ensuing pages of her narrative, Coldicutt reflects often on her life and faith while mixing in fictional characters and scenarios that involve, for example, a teenage girl’s admitting she’s pregnant, a middle-aged couple’s dealing with a rebellious daughter, and an ambitious software executive’s hoping to have a discreet abortion without her husband’s knowledge. She also includes reflections on Gospel narratives, as when she fleshes out the story of Mary telling Joseph that she’s pregnant. Coldicutt nicely puts it: “[Joseph] drew her gently to a rough-hewn bench he was halfway through planing, swept the shavings off it and sat down with her.” Throughout these vignettes, Coldicutt regularly lists questions for discussion or further thought, such as, “Why was it necessary for God Incarnate to be born in a cave, wrapped in a blanket and placed in a rock-hewn manger?” The centerpiece of these inventions is the author’s dramatization of the famous incident in John 4 in which Jesus talks with a Samarian woman at a well and eventually reveals to her that He is, in fact, the Messiah. “Now she understood,” Coldicutt writes. “This bubbling sensation within her, this was the spring he had spoken of.…Things would never be the same.” This sense of immediate personal transformation runs throughout the book and will doubtless make it very inviting reading for the author's target Christian audience.
A passionate and warmly readable mixture of Christian Bible study and autobiography of faith.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2020
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Urlink Print & Media, LLC
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Did you like this book?
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2022 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
