Review: Solid Prayer Book
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 3, 2014
Prayer is a way of living.  It is not a separate activity crammed into one's life, though it may feel like that at times, but is an ongoing personal communication with God.  The prayers in this book help illumine this understanding.  There are prayers to be said in the morning and evening, prayers before and after meals, prayers to the saints and to one's guardian angel.  There is the Angelus for noon prayers, the Memorare for various times of need, and so on.  In short, the reader is confronted with a simple fact: we are to pray unceasingly.  And a multitude of examples abound in this little book.There is one major flaw in this book, however, which prevented me from rating this with five stars.  The introduction is a jarring dissonant sound in the midst of the beauty of the prayers.  It is an academic text of definitions, categorizations, acronyms and rationalist filler.  The author/editor states that the prayer book is intended for beginners as well as adepts in the practice of prayer, and the introduction is supposed to help those somewhat more advanced.  I feel certain that those advanced in the way of prayer will not find the class hall lecture that is the introduction all that helpful for their own prayers.  Had the author/editor simply cut out all of the introduction up to the final section ("Introductory Remarks about this Prayerbook"), he would have improved the introduction itself incalculably.I was given a free copy of this book for review.