The Art of Storytelling: Easy Steps to Presenting an Unforgettable Story

The constant inclusion of the author's religious opinons dilutes the content and distracts any reader who may be interested in learning the storyteller's art. Any reader who indeed is interested in learning more about the reader's religous opinions would, of course, be delighted.

All in all, the book would not be helpful to anyone other than a total beginner at storytelling and even for the beginner, there must be better sources.
Paul Baum, Ph.D.
Living Historyist

The preceding two reviews are each from opposite camps, and are both equally useless. One says the book is completely bad because of its religious bias, which I don't think is fair or accurate. The other review says that the first reviewer is wrong good without any discussion of why. This book is not useless, even to those outside it's target audience; neither is it particularly good even for that audience, and I dispute the implied claim that being written from a Christian perspective makes it inherently better than a similar secular book.

What this book suffers from is not bad writing; it's a bad title and description. This is NOT a secular book. While it's an exaggeration to say that God or Jesus are mentioned in every line, this is quite clearly written by a Christian, for other Christians, and the entire work is steeped in biblical references.

However, that doesn't make it a "piece of crap." What it does make it is a poorly-titled and (at least here on Amazon) -marketed book. This work should state its bias, if not in the title, then at least in the subtitle. It is NOT a general guide on storytelling, which is what both its title and ad blurb appear to indicate. It contains enough Christian references to distract even most Christians I know, never mind someone not from that religious tradition. And that is exactly what Christianity is; a religious tradition. It is NOT the one and only source of grace or divinity.

So, that statement ought to help you determine whether you can get any use from this book. If you read that and said, "blasphemy," or regarded the statement as a one-way ticket south for my soul, this is probably right up your alley. If you said, "hmmm. he may have a point," be wary of this book. And if you said, "right on," or any permutation thereof, steer clear.

That said, it's not badly written, although there's nothing here you won't find in a half-dozen other books on storytelling. In fact, unless non-biblical stories are patently offensive to you, I would say many of the others would probably serve you better (Ramon Ross' "Storyteller" is particularly good, as is Jack Maguire's "Creative Storytelling"). They contain more in the way of actual advice.

Basically, what this book has going for it is precisely what the marketing of it seems to have ignored; it's storytelling advice told from a Christian (and, while I don't know the author's background, I would guess somewhere far right at that; you know, the kind of folks who use the word "grace" regularly, and they're serious) perspective.

If that sounds like your cup of tea, you'll probably enjoy this book.

After reading this book, you realize clearly that critics from Sweden exist in all manners of life and even though they need these books more than others, their blindness keeps them from recognizing how to see grace in life and share it with others. Don't be influenced by the review above.

I bought this book to learn to improve my storytelling skills but all I got was a book about jesus and god where I can't relate to at all.
Every sentence of this book is about God and priests.
Now I can see how storytelling could be a good thing for priests to learn, but in that case the book should still be objective and maybe at the end have a special chapter how this can be used for priest, but instead this is a book only for priests and fanatics which you can maybe translate into other uses.

So sure, if you are not a priest you may still be able to use this if you put extra much effort to think how this can be used in other ways than just telling the bible, but I would rather recommend you to get a real book written by someone how takes his time to think about the answer of the stuff he writes about instead of just saying it's gods will.

This was an excellent, practical book that really did help me learn to communicate better with my class of young children. My husband, a pastor, also improved his sermons! We hope to use this book to teach a workshop on storytelling skills.