Complex material ably digested for the lay reader.
Deeply erudite, sure-to-be-controversial history of the persecution of Christian churches throughout the world.
Before Christianity was a Western European concept, it was Eastern, demonstrates Jenkins (History and Religious Studies/Penn State Univ.; God’s Continent, 2007, etc.). The religion took shape first in Syria-Palestine and in Egypt, and until the 13th century, churches extended east from Constantinople to Samarkand and south from Alexandria to the desert of the Ogaden. In fact, what is now the Islamic world was once Christian, and two Eastern churches, the Nestorians and the Jacobites, flourished in Mesopotamia and Syria well into the Middle Ages as repositories of scholarship and spirituality. The author looks at the life and work of the bishop Timothy (d. 823), patriarch of the Church of the East. What we learn about his career “violates everything we think we know about the history of Christianity,” Jenkins states. There never was a Dark Ages in the East, which maintained access to texts, science and classical learning. The Church of the East spoke and thought in Syriac, had a rich interaction with other religions and built on the ruins of other great cultures in Persia, Assyria, Babylon and Elam. Much of what we call Arab scholarship, Jenkins asserts, was actually Syriac, Persian and Coptic. Yet with the rise of Islam—and here he begins to tread perilous waters—assaults by Saracen Muslims and pagan Northmen combined to eradicate the Christian world of the East so completely that “its memory is forgotten by all except academic specialists.” The author patiently chronicles the subsequent cycle of conversion, discrimination and persecution, studying the remarkable survival of “ghost” churches, like the “hidden Christians” in Japan.
Complex material ably digested for the lay reader.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-147280-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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