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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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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
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