Customer Reviews

Living Beyond Your Lifetime: How to Be Intentional about the Legacy You Leave

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mike Huckabee's books are real treasures. Mike may be a politician - but he is first a person who is committed to his faith and living our his faith. Living Beyond Your Lifetime is an awesome book describing how to order your life by choosing Bible-based principles. Even if you are not a Christian, the principles ring true. Contrary to the mindset of our self-driven culture, Mike presents Bible-based principles which places the needs of others before our own agenda. The book is a captivating, easy read with "Questions for Reflection and Discussion" at the end of each chapter.

Mike Huckabee is the former governor of Arkansas and is a candidate for President of the United States. He is an excellent writer. He has something to say. His moral compass is pointed in the right direction. He is highly intelligent, but in a folksy way. I think he has the best chance of any Republican to win the general election. I have bought 4 of his 5 books, and am happy with them all.

Final review, of four books taken together.

I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns.

1998,Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence, is his first book and also the most earnest. I like this book, very much. The Governor weaves a rich tapesty of a culture of disrespect, too many bad laws, not enough community and faith, and I for one buy into his message: our society has fragmented and we reap what we sow. See also my reviews of:
Rage of the Random Actor: Disarming Catastrophic Acts And Restoring Lives
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead

2000, this book, I find equally earnest, with a very strong consistent appreciation for God and faith and community in faith, for stewardship. Like the first book, I give this one five stars. I now include this book with other positive books on religion, see my reviews of:
GOD'S POLITICS: Why The Right Gets It Wrong & The Left Doesn't Get It (H)
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik

2007 Character Makes a Difference: Where I'm From, Where I've Been, and What I Believe
2007 From Hope to Higher Ground: My Vision for Restoring America's Greatness

Both of the above are formula books, somewhat contrived, but earnest and sufficient to come to at least two conclusions:

1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).

2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.

The latter book touches on various "mandate for change" issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.

We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.

In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.

Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.

This is a really inspirational book! My husband, who does not read anything he doesn't have to, read this book in 3 days! Now that's amazing!

Reverend Mike Huckabee's "Living Beyond Your Lifetime" is published by Broadman & Holman Publishers, a press notorious for publishing books insisting that all religious traditions other than evangelical Christianity "may be summarized as an endless reworking of spiritual depravity," (Reagan's Children: Taking Back the City on the Hill p. 70), for denouncing the "gutless ecumenism" of mainline pulpits while declaring that mainstream charitable organizations such as Big Brothers Big Sisters are "the vehicle for the destruction of thousands of young lives," (Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America p. 80), and for deriding even the ACLU's defense of our civil liberties as an affront to God and "war against America's core values." (The ACLU vs. America: Exposing the Agenda to Redefine Moral Values p. 2).

Huckabee is not quite so shrill when he urges us to contemplate the long-term consequences of our actions, both in our own lives and in the lives of others. His book, however, quickly degenerates into aimless collection random platitudes, trite stories, and dumb jokes - with each chapter followed by "Questions for Reflection and Discussion," as if Huckabee's thoughts really were profound enough to warrant much discussion.

For the most part they are not. Perhaps the "Questions for Reflection and Discussion" indicate that the book is meant for church study groups. For the average reader, they don't add much.

There is some real wisdom here. For example: "The real job of leaders is to make others successful rather than using others to make themselves successful." (p. 109). I can't argue with that.

And I have to agree with Huckabee that we should think deeply about the consequences of our actions. "We make choices that have consequences for a lifetime," Huckabee observes, and "if we believe there is even a remote possibility that something about life matters because of the lasting implications our actions have, this should cause us to think differently, live differently, and leave a different kind of legacy." (p. 7-8). "It is how we live that will affect generations to come and countless people whose names we don't even know." (p. 13).

This kind of circumspection, and focus on the consequences of our actions, is something one might expect from a Buddhist sage. "Suffering is inevitable for a human being," Huckabee writes, echoing the Buddha's observations concerning impermanence and suffering. (p. 150). Huckabee even echoes the Buddha on suffering's cause and cure: "A sense of real peace is achieved only when you can say that material things are genuinely immaterial." (p. 160).

But Mike Huckabee is no bodhisattva. And, to tell the truth, one quickly suspects that Huckabee doesn't really mean much of what he says.

Consider, for example, the chapter on "The Politics of Personal Destruction" (pp. 27-35) one of three chapters from this book that Huckabee recycles in Character Makes a Difference: Where I'm From, Where I've Been, and What I Believe.

Huckabee minces no words, as he distances himself from politicians who campaign for office by means of personal attacks and innuendo:

* "A politician who seeks to win an election by destroying the reputation of his opponents will eventually die by the sword." (p. 30).

* "It is a big mistake for people of integrity and faith to believe that they advance their cause by destroying the competition." (p. 31).

* "Truly successful people are more critical of themselves than they are of others." (p. 33).

* "Although attacking others will sometimes work with voters, it will not work as we stand before God's judgment seat." (pp. 34).

Huckabee portrays himself as a man of pure principles, above the mudslinging fray. Yet running for his party's presidential nomination, the Baptist minister quickly demonstrated a proclivity for very sort of character assassination and innuendo that his book condemns. In an interview with Zev Chafets, for example, Huckabee derided Mitt Romney's religion: "'Don't Mormons,' he asked in an innocent voice, 'believe that Jesus and the devil are brothers.'" (New York Times Magazine, Dec. 16, 2007, p.70).

Soon after, Huckabee was in Iowa, rolling out a press conference to call attention to his own campaign ad attacking Mitt Romney's integrity and honesty. Huckabee took the stage to announce that he was taking the high road, and that his conscience would not permit him to run the attack on Mitt Romney's character. But he was pleased to play it for journalists in attendance, who were welcome to run the ad as a "news item," getting Huckabee's character assassination on the airwaves for free.

"Thus also Cicero, in one of his invectives: 'I do not mention my adversary's scandalous gluttony and drunkenness, I take no notice of his brutal lusts, I say not a syllable of his treachery, malice, and cruelty.'" (A Course Of Lectures On Oratory And Criticism p. 121).

No, not a syllable. Huckabee's attack ad ended: "If a man's dishonest to obtain a job, he'll be dishonest when he gets the job." Well, I guess Huckabee should know.

"Even when we pretend to be humble," Huckabee writes in his book, "there are those moments in which our true nature bursts forth." (p. 43). Huckabee's a press conference to publicize his ad attacking Mitt Romney may have been one such moment. His carefully polished humility and air of decency turned out to be sheer pretence.

In fact, much about Huckabee appears to be pretense. "I do not call for our government to determine what people can or can't believe or what they can or can't see," Huckabee declares at one point in his book, seeking perhaps to allay concerns that the Southern Baptist minister intends to impose his own brand of morality as law. (p. 48). But a few pages later, Huckabee's arguing that he has every right to do just that. While some may contend "that private morals are private and not the domain of government," Huckabee insists that he knows better, and that "a stronger argument can be made that the public has the right to determine what is in the best interest of all citizens." (p. 51). "Citizens do, in fact, have the right to determine what we consider appropriate as a society," declares the evangelical minister, who feels qualified to declare what's best for the rest of us. (p. 51).

How far he might go is anyone's guess.

Eric Alan Isaacson