Deserves—and will almost certainly find—a wide readership while garnering for Wills both praise as a principled...
The prolific historian offers a timely confession of faith and an apology in the true sense of the term.
Wills (James Madison, p. 244, etc.) is not just any Catholic: he studied for the priesthood, has worked in Jesuit and papal archives, and has written many books on moral matters and the intersection of politics and religion. For having dared question the Church’s positions on matters of doctrine great and small, he has been nearly stripped of his membership as one of the faithful. “I am not a special case,” he writes, “but in many ways a typical one.” In light of all this, asked why he chooses to remain a Catholic, Wills answers with quiet dignity, “because of the creed.” By this he means the creed offered by Christ in the Lord’s Prayer (ever the trained classicist, he offers a new translation that hugs closely to the original Greek) and by the apostles, who pledged faith in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and life everlasting.” Would that it were all so simple. Arguing against generations of doctrine on such matters as women’s unsuitability for the priesthood, papal infallibility, and “peripheral stances taken by church authorities, some of which are not only non-binding but scandalous and morally repulsive,” the author takes a long tour through Catholic history, separating the words of Jesus, Peter, and Paul from their later representatives and, critics might object, casting aside whatever does not suit him in search of a more user-friendly brand of Catholicism. Though immensely learned and capable of holding his own in any argument, Wills also calls on some heavy-hitters for backup, including English writer G.K. Chesterton (a favorite of clerical conservatives), saintly socialist Dorothy Day, and the brilliant Thomas Aquinas.
Deserves—and will almost certainly find—a wide readership while garnering for Wills both praise as a principled oppositionist and condemnation as a heretic.Pub Date: July 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-13429-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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