A wide-ranging and insightfully empathetic exploration of pain and guilt’s root causes and ultimate succors.
A Christian-oriented debut guide focuses on pain and healing.
“Our natural tendency as humans is to proceed with our lives, forgetting the past,” Gienty writes in her manual. “The problem is the past is never really forgotten unless it is healed by Jesus.” That emotional healing takes four forms or steps, which Gienty lays out and then patiently explains: The faithful must be willing to look honestly at their sins; examine how others have sinned against them; confess those sins to God (and maybe, where appropriate, to others); and finally be open to receiving prayers for healing. The author seeks to concentrate on “woundedness” by urging readers to delve deeply into their own pasts for the roots of both the pain they experience and perhaps the pain they’ve caused others. The chapters include spaces for written answers to the many discussion questions designed to help readers zero in on the realizations Gienty believes they need to reach in order to move forward (for example, “What consequences have you experienced that have broken your heart because of not trusting others?”). The author fleshes out her musings on the nature of tangled human emotions with stories from various individuals, who reveal the rocky roads they experienced while contending with sin and poor self-esteem (“I’d been living with one foot in and the other foot out of my Christian walk”). That tone of honest disclosure gives the book a great deal of its immediacy. And the backbone of that immediacy is a personal relationship with Jesus. “We must learn to minister to the Lord,” she writes, and if we do, he “promises that He will empower us” to overcome both our own inner woundedness and the pain we may have caused others. The goal of all this is deliverance—from addiction, from guilt, from pain—and Gienty wraps the whole concept up in engaging, inquisitive prose that effectively simulates a series of long, probing conversations with a levelheaded (and scripturally literate) friend.
A wide-ranging and insightfully empathetic exploration of pain and guilt’s root causes and ultimate succors.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-8046-8
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
