Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers Author: Visit Amazon's Anne Lamott Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1594631298 | Format: PDF
Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers Description
From Booklist
Inspiriting, trenchant, and funny, best-selling Lamott takes an imaginative do-it-yourself approach to spirituality in her disarming and stirring essays. Unabashedly emotional yet practical and sharply attuned to the absurdities and tragedies of life, she focuses on prayer in this mighty little volume, defining it as “communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding.” If you are uncomfortable addressing God, Lamott suggests praying to “the Good.” The point is to make contact with “the Real, with Truth, with the Light.” To take a moment to focus and breathe. She cites three basic themes. Asking for help, she writes, “is the first great prayer.” Giving thanks is essential, and not only when things are going well. One also benefits from summoning gratitude for hard truths and tough challenges. “Wow” is the joyful expression of wonder in response to astonishing moments great and small. With a stand-up comic’s snap and pop, candid and righteous Lamott tells hilarious and wrenching tales about various predicaments that have sparked her prayers and inspired her to encourage others to pray anytime, anywhere, and any way. --Donna Seaman
Review
“Charmingly irreverent.”
—MORE magazine
“Filled with Lamott's unique brand of humor, wisdom and profound spiritual insight… She has a gift for putting into words what it means to accept and ultimately embrace the beauty, mystery, and pain that is life.”
—San Antonio Express-News
“Practical and poetic advice on prayer.”
—The Oregonian
“An imaginative do-it-yourself approach to spirituality…With a stand-up comic’s snap and pop, candid and righteous Lamott tells hilarious and wrenching tales about various predicaments that have sparked her prayers and inspired her to encourage others to pray anytime, anywhere, and any way.”
—Booklist
“[A] prayer manual for people who wouldn’t be caught dead reading prayer manuals… anybody who gets it as a holiday gift will likely just say, ‘Thanks. Wow.’”
—Publishers Weekly
“A refreshingly simple approach to spiritual practice in a pint-sized reflection on prayer…Lamott manages to deftly convey the idea that in trying to control things, we’ve largely lost our ability to see the good and the miraculous in everyday life…there’s more here than meets the eye.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[With Lamott’s] usual fluency and charm…A worthy successor to her prior works…[Help, Thanks, Wow] will delight Lamott’s regular readers, and likely draw new readers to her writing.”
—Library Journal (starred review)
See all Editorial Reviews
- Hardcover: 112 pages
- Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover; First Edition, 1st Printing edition (November 13, 2012)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 9781594631290
- ISBN-13: 978-1594631290
- ASIN: 1594631298
- Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
When you read thin books, you always assume that they are sharp and succinct, that they were once big books that have been cut to the bone, trimmed to the essence, and winnowed to their winning ways before submission for publication. You certainly entertain no thoughts of repetitiveness -- not in a thin book. That's forgivable with Dickens, Thackeray, and Fielding. They write huge tomes that earn the room for error. But the 100-page book? No.
That's my main beef with Anne Lamott's long essay on prayer. I read a NY Times essay of hers that I enjoyed mightily. It told of how her family was anything-but religious, how they worshiped at the altar of great writers and lived a Bohemian lifestyle. Lamott cut against the family grain. She got religion -- of a sort. But, in writing about it in this book, she travels six ways to Sunday yet keeps arriving at the same four-way intersection. That is, as I read it, I found the same repetition one gets in rote recitals of real-life prayers, and I thought to myself, "This would never see the publishing light of day if not for the name of its author."
I should have been the perfect audience for this book, which is why I bought it. I am irreligious, yet spiritual; agnostic, yet defensive about God; skeptical, yet trusting in the great unknown. Lamott is similar. She has no patience for Christians who claim to know "the way" because, of course, they don't. Hers is a most laid-back and understanding God. He (sometimes Lamott goes with "She") doesn't mind if you say, God, I'm P-O'd with you this time, as if these are the risks deities take when they get in the business of creating humans. Frankenstein's monsters, and all that.
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