A delightful read with some solid insights into a life of faith that will leave the reader asking, “Where do we go next?”
In her debut work, Deitz loses the wrong job and sets out on a journey to find the right one but ends up finding something much more important—a solid relationship with the almighty.
Suddenly unemployed, Deitz spends her time building a stronger relationship with God. Using the lines from the 23rd Psalm as the format for her work, Deitz begins her journey by asking why she was fired and questions what part God played in this event. She does some soul-searching through the relating of sad tales of her friends and using their courage to find her strength. She takes the reader from recognizing personal giants in her hometown, to finding safety in a mission in Outer Mongolia, to seeing prison life as a teacher (presented through her journal entries of the time), to learning about yoga at a Buddhist retreat. She is indeed a skilled teller of tales to the point where the reader can get lost in the stories and forget the larger purpose of the work. Scattered throughout are Bible verses that add understanding to the situations or give some clarity to the lesson to be learned. Each chapter ends with a study scripture and study questions for the reader to do self-evaluations. The highlight of the work, though, is Deitz’s storytelling; she has a keen ability to fully craft characters and vividly relate events so that the reader is immersed in a substantial world. What doesn’t work so well are the tasks left unfinished; there are a few instances when God tells Deitz to do something but it does not get done or she starts down a path where her ultimate destination is unclear. But these issues do not significantly detract from the work.
A delightful read with some solid insights into a life of faith that will leave the reader asking, “Where do we go next?”Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1466370821
Page Count: 147
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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