An often cutting work that calls down a plague on the houses of all domineering belief systems.
An extended diatribe against organized religions as well as atheism.
In its attempt to highlight the arrogance and entitlement of the three Abrahamic religions, Musa’s nonfiction debut takes as its argumentative starting point the rather idiosyncratic assertion that the Old Testament prophet Abraham was “the first atheist in mankind’s recorded history”—a rather strange claim for a figure said to have had numerous one-on-one conversations with God. Musa’s book follows this muddled beginning with a passionate assault mainly on those whom the author sees as the corrupt, power-hungry, hypocritical men who control the three major organized religions. Musa seems to conceive a kind of essential faithfulness that has nothing to do with formalized creeds: “The end of faith is not a priority,” he insists, “the real priority is to destroy the ego of the broods of vipers from all categories, including arrogant biological atheists, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, etc.” Under the heading of “biological atheists,” he includes such figures as physicist Stephen Weinberg, ethologist and biologist Richard Dawkins, and the late writer Christopher Hitchens (who’s described, in one of the book’s occasional language slip-ups, as a “renounced,” rather than “renowned,” atheist). Musa appears to find these atheists to be every bit as insulting and doctrinaire as their religious counterparts. His contention that if one sets compassion aside, no holy book will make one moral is undoubtedly correct. However, some of the book’s more unusual ideas will leave both religious and atheist readers wondering whose side he’s on. Overall, he seems to advocate a purely personal faith system—a direct and relatively duty-free connection with God: “Be confident in the knowledge that just as you feel proud of El—the new/old name by which you will call the Creator—El is also proud of you,” Musa writes. “What you need to do is be strong and face Satan’s temptations courageously.”
An often cutting work that calls down a plague on the houses of all domineering belief systems.Pub Date: July 30, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-49-904367-9
Page Count: 346
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 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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