Impressive and wide-ranging, if somewhat scattershot.
Comprehensive exploration of how Christ’s betrayer has been portrayed throughout history.
There are only 22 references to Judas Iscariot in the New Testament, notes Gubar (English and Women’s Studies/Indiana Univ.; Rooms of Our Own, 2006, etc.). Despite this paucity of material, artists and writers over the centuries have repeatedly redefined and reinvented him. The author sets out to explore these many facets of Judas’s identity by sketching his “evolving incarnations” during the course of 2,000 years. The range of attitudes is at times mind-boggling: Judas, Gubar shows, has been portrayed as everything from a dung-eating monster to the moral superior to Jesus himself. In an overly lengthy introduction, the author explains that she has identified five personae of Judas: “anomaly, pariah, lover, hero, savior.” Each chapter explores one of these characterizations. During the Middle Ages, portrayals of Judas became increasingly demonic and disturbing; he is shown in art and poetry as a subhuman prone to vile and disgusting habits, or punished by eternal ailments and abuse of the most horrific kind. The Renaissance began to redeem Judas by focusing on his closeness to Christ in art depicting the kiss of betrayal and his inclusion at the Last Supper. Some modern writers and artists have offered even more favorable views; a few dubbed him the true savior of humanity. This was sparked in part by revulsion against Nazi propaganda, which Aryanized Christ and depicted Judas as the quintessential money-grubbing, hypocritical and untrustworthy Jew. Gubar compares her subject to figures as diverse as Oedipus and German anti-Hitler activist Dietrich Bonhoeffer, spotlighting imagery that reimagined Judas over the centuries as everything from a tormented sinner to a heroic rebel. The text’s vast scope at times blurs its focus. Presenting “a kaleidoscope of perspectives,” the author draws them together in a hasty summing-up (“Judas is our mirror”) not adequate to the richness of her material.
Impressive and wide-ranging, if somewhat scattershot.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06483-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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