A disjointed but provocative account of a spiritual journey. Grumbach (Fifty Days of Solitude, 1994, etc.) has continued her recent spate of autobiographical writing with this brief but insightful glimpse into contemplative prayer. After losing her individual religious quest in the busy-ness of parish life, Grumbach quit attending church and focused instead on recapturing a certain spiritual epiphany of her young adulthood, never repeated since. In characteristic fashion, her quest brings us into dialogue with various poets, mystics, and philosophers; this memoir is particularly influenced by Simone Weil, Thomas Merton, Kathleen Norris, and Julian of Norwich. (Grumbach includes a helpful bibliography for further reading.) A hideously painful bout with shingles challenges her meditative practice, and she finds that prayer is often impossible under such circumstances. She thus eschews praying for healing to seek out God’s presence and turns also to the discipline of daily psalm reading (—How long, O Lord, wilt thou forsake me?—). She expresses qualms throughout that her exclusive personal quest may be leading her further from true prayer, which others—including Norris, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and her own seminary-administrator daughter—attest can only be experienced in community. In truth, Grumbach’s journey even borders on the cantankerous: —I wanted to use the time I had left seeking Him out intimately, and loving my neighbor at a distance.— Though brilliant, the writing is chaotic in its organization; the penultimate chapter succumbs to a mÇlange of quotations on prayer that Grumbach has collected on her journey. Even the author seems somewhat aware of her memoir’s dissatisfactions: in the epilogue she notes that in her manuscript she came to replace every ’solid-seeming noun— with —tentative adjectives and gerunds.—
Pub Date: Aug. 10, 1998
ISBN: 0-8070-7084-X
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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