The authorities will cry foul, but you can bet American Catholics will be reading and discussing Breslin’s latest—and justly...
A searing indictment of the faithful against a church that has failed their faith, with legendary New York newsman Breslin driving the nails into the cathedral door.
Breslin (The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutiérrez, 2002, etc.) opens, as ever, provocatively: the Catholic Church is led by a pope who “has four subjects on his mind: abortion, abortion, abortion, and Poland”; the Catholic Church has committed gross crimes by knowingly sheltering perpetrators of crime, sexual and otherwise; the Catholic Church has thrown up false gods; the Catholic Church has forgotten the Catholic religion. So, he proposes, he’ll start a new religion, one with women priests and married heterosexual priests and a vision of a working-class Christ with no taste for fine raiment and golden trappings, with Breslin himself serving to open “the first new Catholic parish in my diocese of Brooklyn since 1972”—and taking a choice job in it. “I qualify for the rank of bishop,” he explains, “because I’m not a pedophile.” Bishop Breslin qualifies, too, because he’s Irish, and the Irish are the real rocks on which the Church is built (as opposed, he suggests, again controversially, to the Mafiosi who run the thing, at least in New York and Rome). He qualifies because he attends Mass weekly, has put in more time examining its wrongs (and occasional rights) than most working cardinals, has logged countless hours exposing the bodies under the rectory rugs, “so many . . . that walking into the diocese offices was risky for the ankles.” He qualifies because he cares. There’s not an ounce of modesty—or irony—in the proposal, and as Breslin delivers his list of charges against the Church his anger and righteous indignation mount, till by the end of this donnybrook of a book, having cited case after case of crime and betrayal, he’s in a fine and furious lather, feeling very much, he allows, like Christ among the moneychangers in the temple.
The authorities will cry foul, but you can bet American Catholics will be reading and discussing Breslin’s latest—and justly so.Pub Date: July 6, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-6647-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2004
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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