Friday, August 16, 2013

Book Review: My Own Worst Enemy by Janet Davis

My Own Worst Enemy: How Stop Holding Yourself Back by Janet Davis is a glittering gem of a book. In a time in my reading where I'm tiring of reading Christian self-help, I found this to be a refreshing book. Unlike many of the other books in the market now, this book offers a fresh biblical view on empowerment. It also isn't a narcissistic personal memoir with just enough bible to pretend it is really a biblical self-help book, which seems all too prevalent in the genre. This book is a biblical, practical and applicable volume that could easily be put on the same level as most Stephen Arteburn books.

What I found most refreshing about this book is that Davis not only organizes her information in logical and thoughtful chapters, but also finds a balance between present day stories and biblical ones that illustrate her main ideas. Instead of spending my mental energy trying to figure out how her points fit together, I could really focus on myself and how each main idea could be incorporated into my own personal growth.

As regular readers of the reviews on my blog should know, my pet peeve in Christian literature is the labeling of books as for women or for men. There is so little in biblical Christianity that is gender specific that I cannot imagine why we need the hundreds of gender specific books on whatever topic. With that said, this book is aimed mainly to women and did a very good job of being gender specific without being belittling, contrived or offensive. If you have to have books that pander to one gender verses the other, this is the way to do it.

Overall, I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is efficiently packed full of meaty, meaningful insight that should be able to be applied by anyone who tends to get in their own way of achieving what God wants for them. This may very well become a staple in my list of go to books to recommend to people.

I was provided this book free of charge from Bethany House Publishing in return for my honest review.

2 comments:

Loraine Branan said...

I have heard great things about this book, and your review made it sound even better. I have read a great Memoir book this summer by Denis Hickey and he wrote so great about his own personal journey and the things he did to find clarity, pretty amazing and very inspirational! Breaking Free is the name if his book, info on the book sitehttp://www.breakingfree-thebooks.com/. Once again thanks for the review, I need to check this one out!

Jenny Wright said...

Glad you enjoyed the review! :)