An elegant little meditation on life and the afterlife, well worth reading while waiting for spring.
A tour of religious thought from the vantage point of that most perfect of cathedrals, the baseball diamond.
“Baseball can teach us that living simultaneously the life of faith and the life of the mind is possible, even fun,” writes lawyer, theologian and New York University president Sexton near the close of this examination of religion’s chief questions as seen through a baseball glove. So it can, and if Stephen Jay Gould observed that science and religion were nonoverlapping magisteria, baseball might just connect them into a Venn set. If science sharpens the mind to a razor edge, then, Sexton counters, religion is a medium of “contemplation, sensitivity, awareness, and mystical intensity”—and so, as every fan knows, is the game, which makes, as Sexton deems it, “a wonderful laboratory.” There are some big questions to ponder, many of which Sexton explores. If there is a just supreme being in charge, for instance, then why have the Cubs labored in the vineyards of hell for so many years? Can God hit a home run so powerful that He can’t catch it? More to the point, Sexton observes, baseball’s calendar is nearly liturgical. Its doubters often become converts to the faith, while its true believers are so often dashed against the rocks; it is a matter of saints (Lou Gehrig) and sinners (a much longer list), with some (Shoeless Joe Jackson) fitting on both lists. Sexton’s view is refreshingly small-c catholic, embracing Taoism, Dante and Yogi Berra in a single sweep, and his enthusiasm for both baseball and the otherworld is refreshing. Whether it will make a doubter of a believer is another matter, for while there may be no atheists in the foxhole, there are still those sad souls who march away from Wrigley Field season after season.
An elegant little meditation on life and the afterlife, well worth reading while waiting for spring.Pub Date: March 11, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-592-40754-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
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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