I highly recommend this book for anyone with the need to work through forgiveness. It is written in a disarmingly simple, lightly humorous style, but the concepts it expouses are very powerful. Claiming that any hurt is like a "mini-death", the authors use Kubler-Ross's five stages of bereavement - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - as a framework to work through the forgiving process.

At the same time, the concept of the two components of nonviolence, resisting evil but at the same time wooing the evildoer, is introduced as a creative way to foster reconciliation.

The book is religious in nature, but by no means oppressively so. It will be beneficial to persons of any or no religious persuasion. A delightful book.

The book was not what I expected in that university English Departments normally classify certain works of western literature written after World War I (roughly) as "modernism," and certain works of western literature written after World War II as "postmodernism." However, this is not what Mr. Linn's book focuses on (yes, I end sentences with prepositions--Bishop Lowth be damned!).

Instead of addressing "modern" and "postmodern" literature as 20th century literary movements (or even as movements in the other arts), Mr. Linn takes us back to the concepts of modern and postmodern philosophy. As I read Mr. Linn's book, I suddenly recalled a little slogan my philosophy professor drummed into my head way back when I was a freshman: "Modern thought begins in doubt with Descartes." With all due apologies to my old professor, Dr. Harbison (and he must be "old" by now), I never really understood what that slogan meant--and I forgot all about it as the years passed (probably at the end of that freshman semester, in fact). However, in an almost Proustian fashion, Mr. Linn was able to bring up that long-forgotten nugget that I did not know I possessed deep in my memory--and now the slogan makes sense!

The ideas in the first chapter of the book are probably too complex for my freshman and sophomore students to fully grasp (Mr. Linn's former high school students who have posted reviews here must be extraordinary--though I suspect he might be teaching more advanced students than the ones who normally enroll at my university). However, I found that Mr. Linn has done an excellent job of taking very complex ideas and presenting them in a manner that is accessible to thoughtful readers without "dumbing down" the concepts.

I have read one other book in this "Teacher's Introduction to" series, and I was completely disappointed with that book because the concepts were not presented accurately after they had been "dumbed down" for the layperson to understand--but this is not the case with Mr. Linn's book. He makes modern and postmodern thought accessible to his readers in the same manner that Stephen Hawking makes contemporary theories in physics accessible in A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME (a book that the majority of my students also would not be able to fully grasp).