Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Life Without Limits -review

I requested (and received) Life Without Limits by Nick Vujicic from Waterbrook Multnomah Publishers for free because his story seemed like it might be a very inspiring and captivating read. It was indeed inspiring. I was not disappointed in that respect.

The story of Nick Vujicic is probably a well-known one. A man born without limbs, except for a small malformed foot. He overcame these limits (hence the title "Life without limits. I think "limits" was a play on the word "limbs." If so, I got a good chuckle out of the pun) in order to become an inspirational speaker. More than becoming an inspirational speaker, it seems Vujicic leads a very busy life. He has gone surfing before, he can swim. It's all rather amazing.

In his story, Nick Vujicic tells many short anecdotes from his life and follows up on these anecdotes with little inspirational blurps about how "If I can do this, then you can be happy/hopeful/successful/etc too." ... yeah, it sounds better in his own words. I really liked the way he would go from personal anecdote to inspirational paragraph. It helped to make his point. Instead of him just saying "You should be happy," he actually explained how despite his circumstances he found things to be happy for, and in a like manner we can find things to be happy for too.

Because his story is so amazing, and the messages he is trying to share with the world are so helpful and wonderful, I almost feel bad with the critique I am about to give. I am not critiquing his message, though. His message is quite good. My only issue with his book is that some of the inspirational messages he provided in the book sounded very cliche. I would have preferred he came up with an original way to make his point instead of using cliche phrases like "Anything is possible." However, he made up for such cliche phrases with amusing phrases like "So walk with me, the man with no arms and no legs, into a future filled with hope!"

Over all, I loved the message Nick Vujicic is trying to spread around the world. Personally, the book was slow-going for me since I'm not a fan of non-fiction, but I still thought it was good. It was hard for me to get into the story at first, since I'm not a huge non-fiction fan, but once I got into it, I was captivated -despite some of the cliche phrases. I'd recommend others read it.

[as an aside: a branch-off from this review can be found on this blog post where I talk about hope: Living With Hope]

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