1 out of 4 stars
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In Peace, to Be or Not to Be, Mary Rose DeAngelo shares insights for reaching one's highest potential through mind, body, soul, and spirit. Based on her life experiences and drawing from her profession as a nurse, DeAngelo describes the powerful correlation between the mind and physical health. She emphasizes the transformative power of love, the strength found in embracing weaknesses, and "discovering God's presence in each other." DeAngelo provides steps for keeping a journal to release suppressed emotions while awakening the talents within the soul to find healing and peace.
DeAngelo conveys passion in her writing. It's evident that she desires to help others find true peace by overcoming some of the spiritually and physically unhealthy beliefs she unintentionally practiced. Additionally, the artwork on the cover is a beautiful representation of the peace DeAngelo hopes to impart to readers.
On the other hand, many of DeAngelo's passionate pleas evoke feelings of being lectured. Another issue is identified by the following comment. "It took 40 years to finish the first book; weeks for the second." Sadly, DeAngelo's admission that she only spent weeks writing the book was painfully evident by the disjointed writing style, repetitious content, and copious errors. Overall, the book read like the erratic ramblings one might write in a journal. It may be therapeutic for the writer to pen pages of unorganized content, but it doesn't engage readers. In one instance, DeAngelo was relating the peaceful feelings she experienced on her vacation in Jamaica. Suddenly, she began writing about acupuncture before reverting back to her vacation story. I realize her intent was to draw comparisons between the two experiences. However, there was an overall pattern of disrupting the flow of one story by jumping prematurely into the next.
Although the book wasn't particularly long, editing the repetitious content probably would have reduced the number of pages by half. To clarify, I'm not referring to emphasizing a specific point or recapping information that was previously covered. The issue I had was with paragraphs that were repeated verbatim in more than one chapter. Some examples include DeAngelo's thoughts on nutrition, praise for Oprah Winfrey, and detailed instructions for writing a contemplative journal about suppressed emotions.
The book wasn't professionally edited, as I noted 32 errors prior to the second chapter. Errors included incorrect spellings, misplaced apostrophes, and random capitalizations. The frequent capitalization seemed to be for emphasis but was inconsistently executed. On the same page, a word would be capitalized three times but not the fourth. There was also a pattern of including sentences as quotations without citing the references. Several scriptures were quoted without any mention of the Bible or the verse reference. For all of the reasons previously mentioned, I rate the book 1 out of 4 stars and am unable to recommend it.
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Peace To Be or Not To Be
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