by Sonia Coldicutt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 31, 2020
A passionate and warmly readable mixture of Christian Bible study and autobiography of faith.
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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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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by Daniel Kahneman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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