{"id":16394,"date":"2020-07-14T14:47:09","date_gmt":"2020-07-14T19:47:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/?p=16394"},"modified":"2021-10-30T12:41:55","modified_gmt":"2021-10-30T17:41:55","slug":"review-of-lifes-passages-from-guyana-to-america-by-erwin-k-thomas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/review-of-lifes-passages-from-guyana-to-america-by-erwin-k-thomas\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Life’s Passages: From Guyana to America, by Erwin K. Thomas"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n

I won a copy of Life’s Passages<\/a> (by Dr. Erwin K. Thomas<\/a>) through Goodreads. I’m always a little iffy about books involving religion (or more specifically religious people). But I was interested in other aspects of the book. So, I determined I’d put up with the religious aspects in order to learn something. I read it in one sitting, during my Solo Protest<\/a> time.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

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Description:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Life\u2019s Passages is a spiritual biography that traces my life as a member of the Thomas’ family up to the present time. Its theme captures the role of a loving and caring God in our lives. Readers will journey in the local environment of a small South American country – Guyana, and explore the realities of living in America as a student and professor.<\/em><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

Review:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n

I think this book has it’s purpose. If Dr. Thomas passed it to his friends and fellow church members, I imagine they’d love it. They know him, after all, and would be interested in his life. But as a stranger reading it, it failed to hold my interest.

I dove into it hoping to learn about a different culture and the life decisions that led a man to immigrate to America. Instead, I opened a book with no central theme. Thomas seems to just write chapters here and there on whatever occurred to him at the time (there’s not even a chronology). Nothing ties the narrative together. There is no central message. The mechanical writing and copy editing are surprisingly clean, but I think Dr. Thomas needed a content editor to walk him through how to make an auto-biography substantive and meaningful.

Lastly, the blurb heavily suggests that this is a religious book. Other than some of the quotes at the beginning of chapters and the occasional “by the grace of God” or “God answered our prayers” (all in the last 1\/3 of the book) this isn’t a religious narrative.<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I won a copy of Life’s Passages (by Dr. Erwin K. Thomas) through Goodreads. I’m always a little iffy about books involving religion (or more specifically religious people). But I was interested in other aspects of the book. So, I determined I’d put up with the religious aspects in order to learn something. I read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19272,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[430,429,231,849,848,181,517],"class_list":["post-16394","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-booksbook-review","tag-black-lives-matter","tag-blm","tag-book-review","tag-dr-erwin-k-thomas","tag-erwin-k-thomas","tag-nonfiction","tag-self-published"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16394","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16394"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16394\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19273,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16394\/revisions\/19273"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16394"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16394"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/sadieforsythe.com\/wp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16394"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}