Peter Costello
Quiet Times With God: a Devotional
by Joyce Meyer (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99)
This is the sort of book that has a very long history in Christianity. Common in the Middle Ages and earlier, they changed their form at the Reformation. Some, like the book of hours of the Duc du Berry, were wonders of the illuminator’s art. Other were quite simple, a little vade mecum of faith, for those who could read to use or to share with those who couldn’t.
But what so many Christians want these days is a book that provides what this title offers, “a quiet time with God”. Our days are overfilled and far from quite; indeed people seem unable to bear silence: they have to have some morning-show voice on the radio. This might be understandable in a newsroom, but not at home. Silence, for some, is indeed golden. But for others it is fearful.
A skilled writer and editor Joyce Meyer provides here a 365-day book of devotion. The format is a short phrase from scripture, an exposition arising from this and a thought for the day, with a prompt directing the reader to another passage in the scriptures to look up.
So it goes around, with every step the reader makes moving them more and more into the Old and New Testaments.
Certainly a book to give to the right person. But more than that, a book for one’s self, to give one those quiet minutes with the very power that moves the universe all the year round.
Burning Heresies A Memoir of a Life in Conflict 1979-2020
by Kevin Myers (Merrion Press, €19.95/£17.99)
In his long career as a journalist Kevin Myers (sometime of The Irish Times, and since of many other papers), has assiduously cultivated enemies – always he says in the name of truth. Some think him badly treated in recent years. But he has been a provocative writer, and provocation always leads to a reaction, equal and opposite. This reviewer, however, has to say that having been the victim of his colourful phrasemaking, in which I felt ill-treated over his reporting of the facts relating to a Flann O’Brien exhibition in Newman House, I would think that on the whole he has done well for himself. In this case what he wrote was in my opinion misleading, but many others he wrote about seem to have felt the same. This book “tells his side of the story”, but he has always done that. Those who have liked him the past, will like this second memoir. Those who didn’t, won’t.
And yet one feels for him in the crisis that brought his career as a columnist to an end in 2017. He admits the piece was carelessly written, but the editorial supervision seems also to have been poor, and, of course, the instant critics of the social media world took care of the rest, within minutes. In every way it is a moral tale of our times.