Walking With Arthur

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY DEC 13, 2004

In 1984, the year his father died, O'Donnell was a highly paid executive with a troubled marriage. "Money and networks were what I thought were the most important things in the world," he confesses and then he met Arthur, a Harvard-educated lawyer, fellow commuter and committed Christian. Through conversations with the wise older man and participation in a Christian renewal movement called Tres Dias, O'Donnell's goals and lifestyle were transformed. Readers of his earlier book, Letters for Lizzie, will recall his wife's struggles with breast cancer and heart failure. This new book steps back a decade before her health crisis to look at the author's interior conflicts and eventual conversion. It is not, however, a spiritual memoir, nor is it really about Arthur, a one-dimensional character who listens with infinite patience and offers the occasional helpful platitude ("Making it is meaningless, Jim, without a higher purpose"). It is, rather, a motivational book, replete with short paragraphs and zippy sentence fragments, written "to encourage men, especially, to seek good friends... who will help them discover what's important in life." In a sweet epilogue, Arthur pays tribute to O'Donnell: "We shared a friendship, every bit as nourishing to my faith as it evidently proved to his." Though sometimes preachy and often repetitive, the book offers gentle wisdom and hope to exhausted strivers.