Ricky Maye

I received this book through the GoodReads first reads program.

[a:Ricky Maye|4616475|Ricky Maye|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1331239217p2/4616475.jpg]'s book is a concise examination of Christianity and the problems that he has with the current incarnation of the faith. He explains how Christian's should strive to be more... well, Christian. What emerges is an understanding of the faith that incorporates the understanding, empathy, and altogether open-mindedness of the faith that existed when the religion first came into existence. I've no problem whatsoever with this message, and indeed, think it is altogether quite a good one.

The book didn't receive more stars from me because altogether this message is one that I've read/heard many times before. I didn't feel that this book brought anything to the table that other authors have not previously thought about and/or wrote about or spoke about in other mediums. Indeed, I thought some other books (such as [b:Jesus for President|1109255|Jesus for President Politics for Ordinary Radicals|Shane Claiborne|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348840695s/1109255.jpg|1096213]) did it a bit better. This book, however, may reach a larger audience as it is readily available through more mediums and might catch someone else's eye.

It's a pretty good quick read, in other words. :)… (mere)

The good thing about this book is that I downloaded the Kindle version free. I am glad I didn't pay for it.

I found myself - perhaps irrationally - annoyed by one of the first sentences in the introduction: ‘We all want to change the world, start revolutions and make an impact.’

Huh? I certainly don’t. Most people I know have not the slightest desire to start any revolutions.

A sentence or two afterwards, I read this: ‘To continue a journey we can’t make that often piet and commonly accepted choice to ignore the past or count it as less importance.’ [sic]

I have no idea what ‘piet’ might mean - I even looked it up, but no joy. Perhaps it was a typo for something else, but I can’t guess what, and the last few words are so ungrammatical as to make me wince.

Alas, this wasn’t just a problem with the introduction. There were grammatical and punctuation errors that were on almost every page of the book. I wondered if I had somehow managed to download a ‘proof’ edition - but I checked the ‘Look Inside’ version on Amazon, and could see at once that I did indeed have the correct version, and that it is still full of errors. In some sections a paragraph just tails away without ending… and the Kindle formatting is poorly done, with some completely blank pages in the middle, a lot of oddly lined pages at the end, and some strange double spacing throughout. This book urgently needs an editor.

I could easily have ignored a few typos, and might even have overlooked the other errors if the content had been inspiring and encouraging - but I searched in vain for something of value. The author talks about stars being ‘scars in the universe’, which is very dubious science. The book leaps about from topic to topic, misquoting Scripture at times, and never - as far as I could determine - actually saying anything clearly. It reads not like a book, but as if it is rough notes for sermons - a speaker using these would pause, and expound on different sections. I kept feeling that there was a lot that the author wanted to say - but almost everything in the book was either trite and obvious, or mysteriously incomprehensible.

Two stars rather than one because I did at least finish reading it - and also because I feel that the author really did have some good points, even though I am none the wiser as to what they were.

Really not recommended.… (mere)