Mar 7, 2018

Pop In Post- Quick Book Recommendation

I'm just covered up in work this week, but I wanted to tell y'all about a wonderful book that I just devoured the last couple of days-



Everything Happens For a Reason: and Other Lies I've Loved by Kate Bowler.  It's a memoir of her experience living with terminal cancer, and reconciliation of that diagnosis with her faith.  That sounds depressing, but I promise it's not!

Here's the blurb-

A divinity professor and young mother with a Stage IV cancer diagnosis explores the pain and joy of living without certainty.

Thirty-five-year-old Kate Bowler was a professor at the school of divinity at Duke, and had finally had a baby with her childhood sweetheart after years of trying, when she began to feel jabbing pains in her stomach. She lost thirty pounds, chugged antacid, and visited doctors for three months before she was finally diagnosed with Stage IV colon cancer.

As she navigates the aftermath of her diagnosis, Kate pulls the reader deeply into her life, which is populated with a colorful, often hilarious collection of friends, pastors, parents, and doctors, and shares her laser-sharp reflections on faith, friendship, love, and death. She wonders why suffering makes her feel like a loser and explores the burden of positivity. Trying to relish the time she still has with her son and husband, she realizes she must change her habit of skipping to the end and planning the next move. A historian of the "American prosperity gospel"--the creed of the mega-churches that promises believers a cure for tragedy, if they just want it badly enough--Bowler finds that, in the wake of her diagnosis, she craves these same "outrageous certainties." She wants to know why it's so hard to surrender control over that which you have no control. She contends with the terrifying fact that, even for her husband and child, she is not the lynchpin of existence, and that even without her, life will go on.

On the page, Kate Bowler is warm, witty, and ruthless, and, like Paul Kalanithi, one of the talented, courageous few who can articulate the grief she feels as she contemplates her own mortality.

Go read it!!

3 comments:

  1. Ahhh, I am on the library wait list for this. The author was interviewed on Fresh Air a few weeks ago---such a good interview!

    ReplyDelete
  2. i always love your book recommendations. thank you! Keep 'em coming.

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