A concise memoir about salvation that Christian readers will find approachable and affirming.
A memoir of one man’s journey to be closer to God.
In his debut, Lane discusses the events that led to his being “saved” and its positive effect on his life and his family. As a child in Nebraska, Terry writes, he participated in church but was never fully involved: “I never felt any spark from God or the pastor about his teaching or the way it was presented….I felt like I was in a wilderness with no guidance.” However, he does recall some wondrous signs early on, such as a vision of praying hands in the clouds, which foretold the important role that faith would play in his adult life. His family eventually moved to California, and he went on to meet his wife, JoAnn, in college at Fresno State. They took jobs and raised children but never found themselves drawn to the church until their young son urged them to do so. Soon after, they both experienced terrible dreamlike visions of a beast in their home, and Lane called on God in a way he never had before: “I learned in an instant of salvation how to also rebuke the Devil at the same time,” he writes. Lane was “saved,” he says, at the age of 34, and the rest of his memoir revolves around his witnessing to others and recounting times when he believes God directly intervened on his behalf. Lane never delves into theology, or his own emotions, very deeply or seriously, which leaves this short book feeling a bit light. However, the excitement he feels for his faith shines through in his straightforward prose. When describing a near-fatal childhood encounter with a moving truck, for example, he mixes humor and a verse about guardian angels: “ ‘[T]hey will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.’ Or get run over by a big diesel truck!” Throughout the text, Lane seems to be constantly in awe of what he sees as God’s impact on his life, and his playful, charming tone makes his amazement personable and entertaining.
A concise memoir about salvation that Christian readers will find approachable and affirming.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490822549
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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