A best-seller in Canada, where it was published in 2008, and doubtless destined to produce both heat and light on this more...
A mildly phrased though decidedly controversial manifesto from Toronto-based pastor Vosper, calling for new practices “to keep the church alive.”
This is probably not the book to give your born-again cousin, unless that cousin is politically liberal and friendly to Canadian ideas of comity. Vosper observes that the organized church is becoming less meaningful, especially to the young, as many people are more inclined to own up to having feelings of spirituality while distancing themselves from conventional religion, which is, to them, a haven of intolerance and ignorance. Vosper courts fundamentalist ire by examining what it is that makes people seek spiritual solutions, including religion, to life’s problems—security in the face of fear and soul-gnawing anxiety being high on the list—and hinting that God is a construct of an earlier, more primitive mind: “When God was still big within the Christian world, it was the church—not any single church, but the worldwide Christian Church—that became its agent.” The author strongly advocates an inclusivity that goes beyond mere gender neutrality, writing provocatively that it “seems almost impossible to be inclusive until we get beneath the naming of whatever it is we are talking about to exactly what it is we are talking about.” Though the church that Vosper envisions may seem to be a little thin on, say, God, and though her approach can seem a little oversimplified at times, her intentions seem well-placed. Without a strongly liberal church, she writes, religion risks being abandoned to fundamentalism, further alienating the middle. For all that, her argument can sometimes seem a little Norman Peale–ish, with its talk of “up-to-date management theories,” “packaging that attracts different user and age group[s]” and “contemporary market devices.”
A best-seller in Canada, where it was published in 2008, and doubtless destined to produce both heat and light on this more orthodox side of the border.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-229485-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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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