A touching, if problematic, testament to the power of faith in a time of trial.
A memoir of Christian faith that focuses on a family crisis.
Merritt (The Gift of Seeing Angels and Demons, 2016) opens this nonfiction work with an account of a personal tragedy: her husband Dan’s 2006 diagnosis of mantle-cell lymphoma, a rare form of cancer with a grim prognosis and a low survival rate. Thus began what she refers to as “our journey into cancer-land,” in which her faith was tested and refined as her husband dealt with medication issues, weakness, chemotherapy, and other difficult aspects of aggressive cancer treatment. She and her husband and their friends struggled with maintaining a “continual attitude of gratitude,” which she identifies at length as the central core of the Christian life—a patient thankfulness that sometimes sits uncomfortably alongside the worry and urgency of serious illness. As long as we live, Merritt tells readers, “God continues to work in and through us to bring us to the point of readiness to step into His presence.” This tone of humble trust will have an immediate appeal to fundamentalist Christian readers. However, some other aspects of the text may cause problems for some readers. For example, the book asserts that “God’s timing was perfect” when he caused the drug Rituxan to be approved in the same month that Dan was diagnosed; however, it doesn’t discuss why other, earlier cancer patients weren’t allowed access to the same drug. Also, it doesn’t address the fact that, despite numerous scientific studies, it’s never been conclusively proven that faith and health are linked. Finally, the author tends to attribute numerous other events to God’s direct intervention—such as the family’s decision to change churches or the fact that a trap caught a mouse in her kitchen—which will seem like overreach to some readers.
A touching, if problematic, testament to the power of faith in a time of trial.Pub Date: May 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8424-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2017
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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