Regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the material, the author’s expertise cannot be doubted.
Satlow (Religious and Judaic Studies/Brown Univ.; The Gift in Antiquity, 2013) explores the holy writings of the Bible back more than 10,000 years.
The author’s knowledge and his resources, both literary and archaeological, are vast. He is searching for the evolution of the Scriptures we read now, whether referred to as the Torah, the Bible or the Pentateuch or Septuagint. The question is not so much who wrote them as how they evolved into universal works of authority. Satlow specifically differentiates among normative, oracular and literary authority. These writings developed in Judah, through the Babylonian captivity, the Hellenistic period and into the time of Jesus. What we call the Bible didn’t really exist until St. Athanasius of Alexandria contributed his list of the holy books in the A.D. fourth century, and it was the A.D. 11th century before there was a standard Hebrew text. These books are not historical in the truest sense; the legacy of the texts and their interpreters is their power to bring order to our world. The author traces the story of the Middle Eastern people as they jockeyed for power for centuries, always carrying their texts to new locales. The story lives thanks to the scribes, who played the largest part in maintaining, copying and, most importantly, reading the texts to their illiterate populations. Satlow’s book is so packed with information that it will appeal most to scholars and those who have spent years studying religious writings. For those who rarely read the Bible and have little knowledge of ancient history, it will be confusing but edifying. In conclusion, the author writes, “[t]his is perhaps the Bible’s greatest legacy: the radically implausible notion that one can build a community, a religion, a culture, and even a country around a text.”
Regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the material, the author’s expertise cannot be doubted.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-17191-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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