A sometimes-startling and always thought-provoking new look at the fundamental tenets of Christianity.
A personal, idiosyncratic study of Jesus Christ and Christianity.
In his latest book, Marchitelli (In the Land of the Birds, 2012) presents a sprawling, highly ambitious new program of Christian understanding that will likely fascinate many readers. Others, however, may feel it revives the ancient heresy of Nestorianism, which holds that Jesus had two separate, largely unshared natures: one human and one divine. Marchitelli’s Jesus, as his title suggests, wasn’t the distant, semihuman rabbi and prophet enshrined in Catholic orthodoxy but rather a fully committed man of the world, a passionate husband and a loving father. The author doesn’t turn the historical Jesus into a full-blown deity: “Making Jesus God the Creator,” he writes, “is like stripping our Messiah of his individual spiritual achievements and diminishing his sacrifice on the cross.” He maintains that Jesus’ wisdom and sacrifices only warrant respect if he was a human being. His Jesus is spiritually perfect but also very much a man and the father of the disciple John. Marchitelli’s unorthodox ideas extend even further; he asserts, for instance, that the Virgin Mary was not only impregnated by a mortal man, but that he was Zachariah, the father of John the Baptist—and that Adam and Eve must also have had physical parents. The author is well-aware of the controversial nature of his assertions, but he also believes that “spiritually adult people” can give new theories a fair hearing. However, some of the premises are extremely questionable; some readers, for example, won’t like his declaration that only heterosexual married couples can enter into a relationship with heaven, and others will object to the odd assertion that until 50 years ago, most people “either had a low education or were even illiterate.” However, the bulk of this energetic, engaging book compensates for such lapses.
A sometimes-startling and always thought-provoking new look at the fundamental tenets of Christianity.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500114633
Page Count: 260
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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