This Christian self-help book won’t reach a broad audience, but fellow travelers will find consolation in its message.
A meditation on the healing power of miracles, and on having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Both the religious and therapeutic communities share the concept of personal healing as an antidote to trauma, but the two traditions rarely coexist harmoniously. Romeo (Traveling with the Life-Giver, 2012, etc.), a licensed marriage and family therapist, effectively tries to weave them into a common fabric in a work that’s both a memoir and a spiritually charged self-improvement manual. She candidly discusses her troubled past, which included her parents’ divorce, her volatile marriage, and her struggles with alcohol dependency and depression. The book’s central focus is twofold as it looks at the transformative power of divine miracles and the therapeutic value of forging a connection with Jesus. The miracles that Romeo says she encountered are numerous and extraordinary: she writes that a pastor instantaneously fixed her uneven legs, much to the astonishment of her chiropractor, and that another pastor made gold teeth suddenly appear in the mouths of his flock. She also writes that after her children discovered that one of their beloved pet fish had died, she resurrected it through touch; at another point, she says that she was plagued by demonic voices and distress, but that she had them successfully exorcised. Her most poignant remembrances revolve around spiritual metamorphoses, such as her husband’s: after turning to God, she says, he quit drinking and managed to find inner peace. Romeo doesn’t describe her trust in Jesus in theological terms, but in those of loving friendship: “I am deeply convinced that Jesus wants us to experience Him.” Eventually, she came to realize that she suffered from dissociative identity disorder; armed with that knowledge and her newfound relationship with Jesus, she turned her life around, and even weathered the death of her husband. The author is admirably forthcoming about her personal challenges, and it’s impossible not to be inspired by the progress she achieved. Given the emphasis on miracles, though, her book is unlikely to appeal to secular or even merely moderately religious readers. Many will wish that she’d furnished more actionable, nonreligious counsel, and that she had written more as a therapist than as a spiritual disciple. However, this book remains an affecting source of encouragement for those who share the author’s theological inclinations.
This Christian self-help book won’t reach a broad audience, but fellow travelers will find consolation in its message.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Tate Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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