A compact, upbeat manual for using Christian inspiration to solve problems.
A spiritual guide to overcoming life’s seemingly outsized obstacles.
As the centerpiece of his nonfiction debut, longtime pastor and public speaker Lawson has chosen the biblical figure of King David, which is always a tricky gambit. Although David is one of the most courageous, charismatic figures in the Old Testament, it can also be argued that he’s one of the most self-serving, so using him as a guide to life requires some careful picking and choosing. As this book’s title indicates, Lawson opens his narrative with the signature story of young David’s heroism defeating the Philistine champion Goliath in single combat. In Lawson’s conception, Goliath stands in for all the seemingly unbeatable difficulties of life, and he stresses that such difficulties are not always external. They can take the shape of an “internal list” of “all those things that one has done, things that have been done to us, mistakes we have made, failures, frustrations, and weaknesses,” he says, which combine to form “an impenetrable case for why we are unworthy to do anything for God.” The author’s easily accessible progression of chapters features plenty of self-deprecating humor and pop-culture references, including nods to the movies The Blues Brothers (1980) and The Princess Bride (1987). He uses a series of stories from David’s life to make his case that “giants come in all forms” and to stress that Christians should strive to make themselves ready for God’s grace, which “restores, transforms, and honors,” he says. He likens this inner readiness to the “life of training” that athletes embrace, and his book outlines steps to achieve it. Lawson refreshingly emphasizes introspection and critical self-evaluation as means of personal as well as interpersonal growth (“one of the great things about becoming more self-aware,” he writes, “is that it helps you understand others”). Throughout his straightforwardly optimistic book, he asserts that the point of self-awareness is to “make room” for God’s grace to enter one’s heart.
A compact, upbeat manual for using Christian inspiration to solve problems.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4908-6249-1
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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