A fair and even-tempered account of a volatile subject. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
A well-reasoned but damning overview of the Vatican’s response to Nazi atrocities during and after WWII.
Following hard upon John Cornwell’s controversial Hitler’s Pope (not reviewed), and John Paul II’s unprecedented apology to Jews in Israel, Phayer (History/Marquette Univ.) offers exactly what was needed all along: a more incisive, if somewhat dry, view of Pius XII that portrays him not as a power-mad anti-Semite, but as an indecisive ruler with definite German sympathies whose fear of Communism and Fascist reprisals (as well as his astonishingly naïve efforts to seek diplomatic protections) provided few obstacles to the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and Polish Catholics. Elected to the papacy in 1939, Eugenio Pacelli took over a divided church whose more liberal members (led by his predecessor, Pius XI) were highly alarmed by their fellow Catholics’ hatred of Jews (including Jewish converts to Catholicism). The author believes that Pius XII halted an encyclical that would have condemned anti-Semitism because he knew that Hitler, a Catholic apostate, had threatened similar attacks against German Catholics. Part of the problem may also have been that Pius XII (who had lived for years in Germany as a Vatican diplomat) looked upon German National Socialism as the devil that he knew—compared to the anti-religious mania of Stalin’s Communism. Once WWII began, in the author’s view, Pius’s refusal to aid Catholics helping Jews escape persecution and his silence about Nazi depravities were, in fact, attempts to maintain Vatican neutrality and to control a church rife with virulent anti-Semites—many of whom would not have hesitated, with Fascist backing, to overthrow the papacy and possibly even destroy the Vatican itself. Although no apologist for the Vatican, Phayer concludes that, given the church’s perversely divided loyalties and its pathetically powerless condition before and during WWII, Pius should be judged not as a collaborator so much as a sad example of a weak man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A fair and even-tempered account of a volatile subject. (20 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-253-33725-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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