The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Bell could have done better.
A former megachurch pastor’s stab at sagacity.
In his latest, Christian speaker and writer Bell, the founder of Mars Hill Bible Church, offers a hybrid work of autobiography and exploration of “big ideas.” The author sets himself up as something of a mystic; indeed, he fondly recounts how a woman in his congregation “pulled me aside and said, “'You’re a mystic.’ ” As he writes, “the mystic doesn’t need an authority figure to validate what they know is true. I was never interested in religion….I was after an experience.” Bell makes it clear that through much of his career, he has strained against, or simply ignored, the authority of church traditions, denominationalism, and established theology. In this brief work, he attempts to distill lessons from his own life and from his grappling with questions of faith and existence, all in a nearly stream-of-consciousness, poetic format. Unfortunately, the author’s halting, fragmented style makes the text difficult to read, and his conclusions are hardly groundbreaking. Among his insights: “We’re made of thingness, / we have life, / we have minds, / and we also have / soul. / And soul is real, / just as real as your skin and bones. / The mind thinks, / the soul knows.” As a memoir, the narrative is scattershot and saturated with Bell’s feelings of loss, confusion, and anxiety. Throughout, the author is unsure about his next steps despite his massive successes in ministry, books (Love Wins, What Is the Bible? etc.), and public speaking. Dipping his toe into quantum physics, Bell sees in the Big Bang and the structure of molecules deep life lessons about belonging and growing. Yet even these ideas don’t convey smoothly, as the author unnecessarily camouflages them within a garden of chopped-up phrases.
The voice of one crying in the wilderness. Bell could have done better.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-62056-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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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