A strange collection of biblical codes that lacks wide appeal.
A debut book offers a key to figuring out the numerical codes embedded in the Bible.
The practice of gematria, or the discovery and decoding of meaningful numerical values embedded within nonnumerical alphabets, is an ancient discipline that was eventually adopted by more mystical strains of Judaism. In this volume, Stone provides a mathematical legend of sorts that decodes various phrases and names from the Bible along these lines. The work includes an “English end-time decryption table” and decodes alternate names for God (“The Ultimate One,” “The Deity”), religious concepts (“Our Salvation”), and a host of other seemingly random notions (“The Big Kahuna,” “Tears of a Clown”). More than once, the author presents the decryption of his own name, birthdate, and Social Security number. In the introduction, Stone writes: “The task at hand is to present Immanu-el (GOD with us), the Creator, etc., and make the specifics verifiable. The onion has many layers and subtleties as the number nine (9) suggests. But this book is a journey, and the end is the realization of God’s human/Divine identity.” The volume subdivides into 12 chapters, but what precisely distinguishes the subject matter of each of them is both unstated and generally inscrutable. This is a short book—only 64 pages—and very little commentary is included. The subject is certainly intriguing. Some sense of the historical and theological significance of such encoding would have been both edifying and interesting to the reader. As it stands, most of the chapters provide decryption without any accompanying explanation, and so this is essentially a reference guide without instructions with regard to its use. And, given the fact that the Bible was not originally composed in English, what is the religious significance of the decoding of an English alphabet translation? The author never addresses this issue. In Chapter 11, Stone inexplicably turns political: “President George Herbert Walker Bush, as Hitler, proclaimed in Japan the New World Order as Hitler had done. President Bush promptly fell on his face: Divine Intervention.” Even for the most ardent religious enthusiasts and those intensely fascinated by such codes, this volume promises little insight into the practice or even the author’s ultimate intentions. In other words, this is less a book than a catalog of puzzles.
A strange collection of biblical codes that lacks wide appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4809-6661-1
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Rosedog Books
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
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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