by Abraham Joshua Heschel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1996
Collected essays by Rabbi Heschel (190772), one of our century's most eloquent and challenging theologians. The introduction by daughter Susannah Heschel, herself a Jewish scholar at Case Western Reserve University, runs to the sappy, but the solid biographical nuggets remind us how this significant spiritual influence on Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant theologians (including Pope Paul VI and Dr. Martin Luther King) was a miraculous ``brand plucked from the fire of Europe.'' Essays on historical events and moral issues of the day, from WW II to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, make up two of the five clusters of essays and addresses here. The other three divisions and a coda of two interviews are more purely theological—though every topic is ultimately theological for Heschel. To this scion of Hasidic masters with a doctorate from the University of Berlin, ``God in search of man'' remains his primary thesis as well as the title of one of his 13 books. To Heschel, WW II underscored an ongoing human failure that allows people to ``suspect that science is a device for exploitation, parliaments pulpits for hypocrisy, and religion a pretext for a bad conscience.'' Never sparing academia or theology, Heschel rails that we ``have bartered holiness for convenience, . . . wisdom for diplomas and information.'' Despite his professional involvement with Reform Jewish and Christian seminaries, Heschel was a daring critic of both, the former for valuing human will over revelation, the latter for preferring Faith over Works. To Heschel, doctrine was unimportant compared to religious wonder, gratitude, and acts of kindness, as ``God is waiting for us to redeem the world.'' This essential collection captures the best of a leading thinker and doer who influenced many contemporaries with an ancient prophetic tradition that he made new.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-19980-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1995
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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