Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers - Hardcover

Lamott, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1594631298 ISBN 13: 9781594631290

Publisher: Riverhead Books, 2012

Synopsis

A New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night Dawn, Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything.

Author Anne Lamott writes about the three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life.

Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott’s funny and perceptive writing about her own faith through decades of trial and error. And in her new book, Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she knows about prayer to these fundamentals.

It is these three prayers – asking for assistance from a higher power, appreciating what we have that is good, and feeling awe at the world around us – that can get us through the day and can show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they mean to her and how they have helped, and explores how others have embraced these same ideas.

Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is the everyday faith book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Lamott is the New York Times bestselling author of Help, Thanks, Wow; Small Victories; Stitches; Some Assembly Required; Grace (Eventually); Plan B; Traveling Mercies; Bird by Bird; Operating Instructions, and the forthcoming Hallelujah Anyway. She is also the author of several novels, including Imperfect Birds and Rosie. A past recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an inductee to the California Hall of Fame, she lives in Northern California.

Reviews

Inspiriting, trenchant, and funny, best-selling Lamott takes an imaginative do-it-yourself approach to spirituality in her disarming and stirring essays. Unabashedly emotional yet practical and sharply attuned to the absurdities and tragedies of life, she focuses on prayer in this mighty little volume, defining it as “communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding.” If you are uncomfortable addressing God, Lamott suggests praying to “the Good.” The point is to make contact with “the Real, with Truth, with the Light.” To take a moment to focus and breathe. She cites three basic themes. Asking for help, she writes, “is the first great prayer.” Giving thanks is essential, and not only when things are going well. One also benefits from summoning gratitude for hard truths and tough challenges. “Wow” is the joyful expression of wonder in response to astonishing moments great and small. With a stand-up comic’s snap and pop, candid and righteous Lamott tells hilarious and wrenching tales about various predicaments that have sparked her prayers and inspired her to encourage others to pray anytime, anywhere, and any way. --Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Books
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1594631298
• ISBN 13: 9781594631290
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 102