Small Victories
Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace
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4.2 • 120 Ratings
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times bestseller from the author of Help, Thanks, Wow, Hallelujah Anyway, Almost Everything, and Dusk, Night, Dawn. Lamott's long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace.
Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It’s an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us—our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found.
Profound and hilarious, honest and unexpected, the stories in Small Victories are proof that the human spirit is irrepressible.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Anne Lamott wrote this slim book of intimate essays during a period of personal and national turmoil. She examines her Christian faith—and how deeply annoying people can be. (Lamott jokes that an alternate title for her book could be All the People I Still Hate: A Christian Perspective.) Loss is at the heart of these essays, whether it’s personal tragedies like the deaths of her parents and best friend or the turmoil caused by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which inflicted seemingly irreparable damage on Lamott’s relationships with her conservative friends. As always with Lamott, self-deprecating humor and delight in life’s absurdities shine through her writing, even when the subject matter is grim. A heartbreaking essay about her tempestuous relationship with her mother, for example, includes a humorous story about the crematorium misspelling her mother’s name on the urn containing her ashes. Lamott reminds us that it’s easy to have faith when things are going your way, but the trick is to find beauty and grace in challenging times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lamott (Help, Thanks, Wow) returns with an essay collection that tackles tough subjects with sensitive and unblinking honesty. Her subject matter is often dark, deriving from the travails of aging and mortality that Lamott, who is now 60, has observed in recent years. Most of the essays involve people Lamott knows who are either dead or suffering from a terminal disease: her best friend who had cancer; her friends' two-year-old daughter with cystic fibrosis; her mother with Alzheimer's, to name a few. But even when considering these hardships, Lamott remains optimistic. Every essay offers a revelation, often tied to her Christian faith. Sometimes she drifts toward clich s, as when she learns, on a hike with a sick friend, that "getting found almost always means being lost for a while." At her best, Lamott is refreshingly frank, admitting that she doesn't want a passionate relationship as much as she wants "someone to text all day and watch TV with." She also has the rare ability to weave bracing humor seamlessly with earnest, Christian faith, observing, "Jesus was soft on crime. He'd never have been elected anything" in an essay about teaching prisoners how to tell their stories. But the book's best insights are subtle, like the thought, on a beach vacation, that heaven must be like snorkeling: "dreamy, soft, bright, quiet."
Customer Reviews
Charlie
This is without a doubt the book of the year.
She keeps out doing her self. What a great book for the holidays.
politics?
Why diss our former president? if i want neg comments i"ll go to msnbc:)
Small Victories
I have always enjoyed the musings of Anne Lamott, and was happy to see she had written a new book. But instead of pithy insights, she wrote a great deal of her disdain for George Bush. If I had wanted to read a critique of him, I could have chosen a political book. This was a disappointment and I do not recommend it.