Peter Costello
The Greatest Secret: How Being God’s Adopted Children Changes Everything
by Krish Kandiah (Hodder and Stoughton, £12.99)
I showed this book to a regular reader of religious books while writing this notice. She grasped the general tenor of its theme at once. “Oh,” she said, “what a lovely idea.” It seemed to her to get to the heart of things as she felt them.
Author Krish Kandiah is a Christian who writes in this book from an unusual but revealing point of view. He is the founder and director of the adoption and fostering charity Home for Good.This book is drawn out of the experiences of his wife and himself, at a time when his Faith and even his belief in God was challenged. They adopted a little girl. This new person and their relationship with the child transformed not just his life, but gave him a reground new insight which seemed to transform his very understanding of his relationship with God.
He was an adoptive father, but he was also the adopted child of God. The warmth and love that the child created in the family core could be applied too to his relationship with God. That loving fullness of acceptance was a new way of seeing just where he was with regard to God. This was “a secret that changes everything about everything”; in a series of ten chapters he explores this, drawing out the implications, so to speak, for Faith, hope and justice.
A Quiver of Poems IV
by E. M. Barrett (All profits to the National Council for the Blind of Ireland, available at NCBI charity shops, €5.00)
The urge to write poetry is a very human one. Poems are not just for the professional poet. They are a way for all of us to refine and examine experiences and emotions that one way or another affect us all. Everyone should have a try, even like Eve Barrett in the admirable little book making their insights a way of supporting those who cannot physically see, except with the inner eye of memory, love and the touch of others. Today might be the day to begin.
A Bloody Victory: The Irish at War’s End: Europe 1945
by Dan Harvey (Merrion Press, €16.95/£14.99).
This is another addition to Colonel Harvey’s series of books on the Irish at war. Perhaps not everyone reading in the present doom ridden days needs it, but it’s a reminder of the sacrifices made to gain and preserve peace from the ever lengthening list of plausible autocrats that people choose to follow.
This book deals with the post D-day advance across Western Europe to victory. Irishmen won a share of the glory of war. Allied victory was hard won, especially for those who lived in places like Brest, Rennes, Amiens and others places which were almost destroyed as well. The ordinary people of Europe in those dreadful years deserve attention too. For many of them the sacrifices of war linger to this day.