A casual, humorous boost for day-to-day spirituality.
A relaxed, affirming daily devotional for today’s Christian readers.
Grote, a youth pastor and men’s ministry leader, started writing down his thoughts on various Bible verses to share with his family members, and he’s now assembled that collection here as a yearlong devotional for a wider audience. Each week, he introduces a short verse from the Bible, and then, for each day of that week, he expands on his interpretation and its applications to modern-day life. Grote’s main objective in each day is to stress an image of a personable, caring God. “Your Daddy God loves you and wants you to enjoy the here and now,” he writes, often mixing in slang and unusual spellings to assert his vision of a less formal relationship with God. The relaxed style helps distance himself from more traditional or judgmental religious writings. “I have no idea what smoting is,” he says of the punishments from the Old Testament, “but I don’t want any part of it.” Grote uses each verse to compel readers to put their faith in God to solve any problems they may face. He uses examples from his own life, ranging from real estate to serious family problems, always emphasizing that “Super-crazy, extreme abundance in every area of your life—that is what your Daddy God wants for you.” There are some brief historical contexts for the verses, paying particular attention to different translations of the Bible, i.e., “I shall not want” versus “I lack nothing” and “I have all that I need.” But these insights are mostly stray observations that Grote loosely links together. The days lack a specific topic or theme, and the use of only one verse for every week leads to repetition and a limited amount of Scripture. In his introduction, Grote encourages the reader “not to disregard something because it goes against what you have been taught or due to my very grammatically incorrect writing style,” yet readers looking for a focused, in-depth study of the Bible may still want to look elsewhere.
A casual, humorous boost for day-to-day spirituality.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490809922
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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