Word: pray
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Most of the "44 ways" involve helping the mujahedin, or holy warriors: giving them money, praying for them, sponsoring their families and encouraging others to join the jihad. Believers are also urged to be physically fit, learn to use arms and spiritually prepare for holy war. Al-Awlaki stops short of telling his readers to go out and fight unbelievers. Instead, he suggests it is enough to have the "right intention" and to pray for "martyrdom." But later in 2009, al-Awlaki's tone grew more strident. "I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies," he said...
Elizabeth Gilbert does these reluctant wives one better. The author of Eat, Pray, Love returns with Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage (Viking; 285 pages), in which she is a vehemently wary second-time bride, due to be dragged down the aisle by Uncle Sam's immigration henchmen, who will otherwise toss her beloved, Brazilian-born "Felipe," as she calls the older man she met in the last section of EPL, out of the U.S. for good. They hadn't planned to marry. Like Gilbert, Felipe had endured a hard divorce, and they were content to be "lifers" together...
...whereas in Eat, Pray, Love the journey was what mattered, the end of Committed is, as of page 18, a foregone conclusion. As Gilbert puts it, she and her lover are "sentenced to marry." This makes the book a supreme act of navel-gazing, even for a memoir. While the legal complexities are being worked out, the two kill time by traveling together. Along the way, Gilbert, ever the good journalist, gathers string on marriage and love from various sources, including the humble Hmong women of North Vietnam, seagulls, a humble frog-farming family in Laos and her humble...
Gilbert is a highly conversational writer - a blessing if you are in the memoir business. Four years after its publication, Eat, Pray, Love remains on the New York Times best-seller list, giving its author a chance, with the likely sales of this new book, to become the Malcolm Gladwell of soul-searching. Gilbert left her loyalists believing that a year of spiritual questing would end with peace, love and the address of the best pizzeria in Naples. There could be no doubt that her readers wanted more. She and Felipe had gone off into the sunset; could...
Were you nervous about following up Eat, Pray, Love? I think it would be totally insane of me to go into this with any hope or expectation that it would do as well as Eat, Pray, Love. There's almost a relief in knowing that it really almost can't. I think other people have really high expectations for what they want this to be, and I hope they're not disappointed...