A spirited cry for religious unity.
In a world filled with religious war and sectarian strife, Yousef sounds Rodney King’s famous cry: Can’t we all get along?
Where demagogues preach hate and zealots spread the gospel of division, Yousef delivers a message of peace and interreligious harmony. In his new book, he does not deny the variations between the three great Western monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Nonetheless, he argues that their similarities should outweigh their differences and that believers of all stripes should come together to begin a new religious revival. The founder of the Islamic Center of Middle Georgia, Yousef writes from a Muslim perspective, but he continually reaches across spiritual divides and finds commonalities. He hopes that his book will spur a return to faith for Christians, Jews and Muslims alike, and he claims that only such a threefold about-face will save us from the numerous, growing evils of the modern world: drugs, divorce, abuse, violence, broken homes and chronic pain. His book draws more frequently on the Quran than on the Bible, but this reliance serves as a strength; it further educates the reader. Using its holiest texts, Yousef paints a portrait of Islam as peaceful, egalitarian and compassionate. Working against critics who smear the religion as violent or sectarian, he describes his faith as advocating social welfare, equality and nonviolence. Islam would benefit from more apologists who could—like Yousef—write to a Western audience. Occasionally, he’s so enthusiastic that one feels he has sacrificed clarity for energy. He could have spent more time developing a logical organizational scheme for his slim volume, and some of his points feel underdeveloped. Nonetheless, these structural deficiencies do not decrease the value of his message; we need more prophets like Yousef to tear down the walls between us.
A spirited cry for religious unity.Pub Date: April 20, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434909350
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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