Gentle musings on four decades of monastic life, by fiction writer and Blue Cloud Abbey resident Tvedten. Readers of Kathleen Norris will appreciate this insider’s view of the monastery in which her books are set. Tvedten weaves the teachings of St. Benedict with the ebb and flow of daily events at his busy monastery. The chapters are quite short, each exploring some component of life in the monastery, from daily prayer to the animal-shelter dogs deposited at Blue Cloud. One of the most interesting perspectives the book offers is a result of the fact that Tvedten was a monk before and after Vatican II and eloquently recounts the ways that his everyday routine changed forever after the Council: Talking was permitted at two meals a day, bedtimes became flexible, some books were no longer forbidden, among other changes (e.g., whereas at one time National Geographic magazine was carefully edited whenever women’s breasts were exposed, today “the swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated is placed in our reading room intact”). Tvedten finds it incomprehensible that young people who never experienced the Church before Vatican II should have such a romantic desire to return to the old ways. He, in contrast, has embraced changes to the liturgy and to the Church. Tvedten seems bent on having readers understand that monks are just everyday folks who shop at Wal-Mart and grumble about their workload (he jokes that the brothers take vows of poverty, chastity, and “discussion”). Blue Cloud Abbey comes off as a place of great spiritual vitality despite the dwindling number (and advancing age) of its monastic residents. “Numbers may determine the amount of work a monastic community can do,” Tvedten concedes, “but they need not detract from the quality of the monastic life.” Through retreats, houseguests, and seminars, the abbey opens its arms wide for the curious public. Tvedten’s honesty and genuine humility keep this memoir from becoming another pat homage to the simple life.
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57322-134-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
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