Chalk one up for the Philistines.
A biographical narrative, in which lawyer, journalist, and amateur Bible student Kirsch (Moses, 1998) aims to strip away the pious gloss that later editors have allegedly added to the Bible.
What he manages instead is to reduce one of the most complex of figures to the constricted dimensions of a rather unsavory third-world politico: David as thug and sexual predator. Kirsch’s method is to paraphrase and expand the Bible text in the manner of paperback “novelization,” filling in the spare Hebrew narrative with invented details, the whole liberally sprinkled with “probably” and “we may imagine.” (When David first beholds Bathsheba, we are invited to “imagine that David woke from his slumber in a state of agitation and perhaps even sexual arousal.”) He then provides brief commentaries on the stories, concentrating on the most sensational scholarly conjectures (Was incest routinely practiced by Israelite royalty? Was David gay?). Kirsch takes David to task for his abuse of women and the handicapped, but he awards him extra points for possibly being Jonathan’s lover. There is a strange combination of literalness and hypercriticism at work here: the author seems to accept much of the Bible’s narrative at face value (although he does admit in his last chapter that many scholars are quite skeptical of its historicity), while discounting all the theological elements in the text as it now stands. In the end, though, the problem is one of sensibility. What can one expect to learn about David from a writer who views the great lamentation over Saul and Jonathan as “pretty sentiments,” dismisses the Deuteronomic historian as a “spin doctor,” and considers the Books of Kings (which include the stories of Elijah, Elisha, Ahab, and Jezebel) as “wholly lacking in the moments of literary grace, political acumen, and high drama that make Samuel such a compelling work of literature”? Kirsch’s David is neither the Bible’s David nor history’s: he belongs rather in our own political and cultural moment.
Chalk one up for the Philistines.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-345-43275-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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