A passionate appeal to Christians to embrace selflessness in their prayer rituals.
Christian minister Garcia calls for a renewed faith in the power of prayer in her nonfiction debut.
Many Christians only pray during weekly church services, or only in times of need. However, in this strong work, Garcia challenges this practice. She cites biblical references that indicate that prayer should not only be continuous, but also difficult, at times: “Is your worship costing you anything?” she asks. “If it isn’t, you must examine your heart and make sure it’s prepared and ready to worship God.” The key, in her view, is the intensely personal nature of prayer, which, in the New Testament, is often conducted in solitude. Her book’s chapters are often broken into many smaller sections, featuring insets containing bullet-pointed insights. Overall, they include many prayers for many occasions, all oriented around the idea of intimate communication with God. Prayer is not concerned with checklists of personal needs, she notes; its focus shouldn’t be on what the faithful have to say to God, but what God has to say to the faithful: “Prayer is like having your phone ring,” the author points out. “When we don’t answer the call to pray, we miss out on what God wants to say to us.” Overall, Garcia uses a clear and accessible prose style to target the practice of facile, lip service prayer, and to encourage readers to pray for the homeless, for orphans, for the outcasts of society who were the focus of Jesus’ ministry (“he did not discriminate. He was available to all people”); she also urges, as Jesus did, prayer for one’s enemies. In the end, this book’s intended audience of fellow Christians will find many simple but valuable affirmations in this book’s pages.
A passionate appeal to Christians to embrace selflessness in their prayer rituals.Pub Date: June 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973625-38-4
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 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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