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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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