The Hiding Place Book

When I was adding every book I could remember ever reading to my Goodreads shelves, I automatically slapped three-star ratings on all the nonfiction books (unless I'd disliked them, or they were specially influential for me) without thinking much about it; I'm more apt to reserve four or five star ratings for fiction --and I'm miserly with the five star ones! But this was a case where, when I sat down to do the review, I decided to change the rating. Corrie's personal narrative of her World War II experiences genuinely are "amazing," in the true sense of the word --both in terms of what she and others went through, what they were called on to do, and the attitude that she and her sister were able to take toward it all. And while, other things being equal, I prefer fiction to nonfiction when I'm reading for pleasure, this book consists of narrative --"story," if you will-- that has the same intrinsic appeal as fiction (perhaps more, simply because it is true) and is every bit as gripping and engrossing.

Of course, Corrie's story is inseparably steeped with her deep Christian faith, and is impossible to understand apart from it. Obedient love for God and for other people created by God was the motivating force for Corrie and her family to do what they did, and for the spirit in which they did it. For a Christian believer such as myself, her story is an inspiration to the same type of self-sacrifice and loyalty, a testament to the ability of Divine empowerment to bring out extraordinary possibilities in "ordinary" people, and a record of God's saving and helping acts in the nitty-gritty world of daily life, such as Corrie's never-failing vitamin bottle. (Any attempt to explain all of these away as "coincidence," IMHO, stretches the long arm of coincidence out of its shoulder socket!).