While it delivers some familiar tips, this healing manual provides an uplifting experience.
A debut Christian guide offers advice to women recovering from breast cancer.
In the introduction to this interactive book, Bonner explains her personal history with breast cancer. She was diagnosed some 17 years ago, and though she has clearly survived her ordeal, she came to realize a number of things about life. She learned to take responsibility for her own health as well as to recognize the importance of journaling and religion. The author covers these and other topics in the pages that follow. She presents seven steps to heal the “body, soul, and spirit”: faith, feelings, family, forgiveness, food, fitness, and fun. In the manual, she attempts to extend her own enthusiasm to readers. The counsel is pointed directly at the “sweet sisters” who have had their own battles with cancer, and readers are prodded frequently to journal about the guide’s contents. These prompts can range from the simple idea of a family (“How do you define family?”) to the complex task of forgiving someone (“Writing it down in your Journal helps get it out, once and for all”). Much of the advice here is practical, as with the chapter on fitness that urges, at the bare minimum, that readers try walking. Throughout the text, the author maintains a tone of positivity and a baseline belief in the importance of God. These two themes are frequently intertwined, as in the quotation of biblical passages like Philippians 4:13: “For I can do everything through Christ, who gives me strength.” Even if some of the suggestions are obvious (readers are told in the fitness chapter that “bodies that move are a gift”), Bonner’s words of encouragement are inherently motivational. After all, the book is written by someone who has been through the same trials as the target audience and who is clearly eager to help others. While it is doubtful that every reader will be convinced to eat “the way God intended” (rejecting “packaged food,” which “can make us sick if we eat it frequently”), the sentiment is unquestionably heartfelt. It is such a tone that helps to make the book persuasive and, considering its brevity at under 150 pages, succinct.
While it delivers some familiar tips, this healing manual provides an uplifting experience.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973613-35-0
Page Count: 158
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 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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