A challenging, unconventional mix of Christian teachings and Muslim interpretation.
A reimagining of the identity of Jesus Christ.
This debut book’s main argument takes a meandering journey, but some of its main points can be summarized as follows: first and foremost, Yusuf asserts that Jesus was not divine; specifically, he challenges the idea of a Trinitarian God and argues that Jesus never referred to God as his “biological father,” nor did he say he came to be crucified or resurrected. Although the author agrees with the Gospels that Jesus was conceived miraculously and that he conducted miracles throughout his life, this doesn’t prove divinity, he says. He also hints that Jesus prophesied about the coming of the Muslim prophet Muhammad when he said that the Father would send a “comforter” in John 14:16. He asserts that Jesus wasn’t crucified on a cross; instead, he argues that Judas Iscariot’s face was miraculously changed so that he looked like Jesus, causing him to be crucified in Jesus’ place. Finally, Yusuf notes that Jesus came to minister to “the lost sheep of Israel,” which he interprets as the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom, which have been lost to history; he therefore believes that Jesus left Palestine and traveled throughout Asia. In this thoughtful but difficult work, Yusuf provides a uniquely Islamic view of Jesus as a person. His conclusions will likely be difficult for Christian readers to accept, but they’ll also challenge Muslim readers, as well. The author shows a high regard for Jesus’ teachings and appears to see him as a distinctly holy figure. However, his attempt to meld the New Testament and Quranic representations of Jesus are often confusing. His work is made especially difficult to follow by numerous errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Overall, this book would have benefited from a more thorough edit, and endnotes would also have been helpful.
A challenging, unconventional mix of Christian teachings and Muslim interpretation.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4809-3332-3
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
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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