An engaging, multidimensional quiz on Yuletide trivia.
Readers will find that there are still new things to learn about Christmas lore and customs in this winsome collection of factoids.
Following up on 2013’s Santa Claus’s Christmas Trivia Challenge, Ozanne (Tom Turkey’s Thanksgiving Trivia Challenge, 2014, etc.) proffers more than 250 new multiple-choice and true-false questions. An opening section on Santa-ology poses whimsical queries both simple (“What animals does Santa use to pull his sleigh?”) and imponderable (“If a home does not have a chimney, or the chimney is too small, what does Santa do?”). But the bulk of the book surveys the diversity and history of Christmas beliefs and practices in the real world. Readers will field questions on the life of the real St. Nicholas, the church legends surrounding him, and the folkloric sidekicks—friendly, mischievous, and monstrous—who accompany him on his rounds in different countries. They’ll also face queries about whether plum pudding actually contains any plums and which benighted land makes eels the main course of its Christmas Eve feast; the origins of Christmas ornaments in medieval plays about Adam, Eve, and the apple in the Garden of Eden; the astronomical provenance of the Star of Bethlehem; and the origins of many customs—such as hanging stockings—in the sentimental imaginations of 19th-century American writers. Ozanne delves so deep into quaint, curious, and occasionally pedantic trivia (“True or False? The Fifth verse of ‘Thou Didst Leave Thy Throne’ refers to the Second Coming?”) that everyone will be stumped by something. The answer section is an education in itself, with many erudite but accessible entries that flesh out the questions’ conundrums. The book could serve as the basis for a fun Christmas Eve game for parents and kids of all ages—from kindergarteners (“Santa has a list of who has been naughty and who has been ____?”) to grad students (“True or False? The industrial revolution helped create the retail side of Christmas?”).
An engaging, multidimensional quiz on Yuletide trivia.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499343540
Page Count: 92
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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