Readers may be unconvinced by these theories.
Hillhouse questions whether the story of Jesus Christ is a hoax, and if the apostle Paul invented Jesus’ story to make money.
Though the author’s theory is not new, his approach goes beyond regular debunking. He uses imagined dialogue between Paul and Barnabas to illustrate how Paul concocted his moneymaking scheme, using Jesus as a clever business strategy. Whether intentional or not, this exchange reads more like dialogue from a marketing conference–Paul and Barnabas slick in shiny suits, creating the pyramid scheme of all pyramid schemes–than imagined conversations between biblical characters. A contemporary take on a biblical story might be interesting, but this reads more as if the author neglected to create a narrative. When Barnabas tries to sway him to take over a religious sect, Paul replies, “This is unbelievable…I’ve been involved in many business deals in the past, but never anything like this.” “Fact” and fiction blur, particularly in the “presumed conversation[s],” which are interspersed with dashes of biblical history. Unfortunately, Hillhouse has his characters stiffly recite information, which lessens the power of the dialogue. In one scene, Paul exclaims, “I propose…That the story of Jesus will now be rewritten using material from a combination of the major events in the life stories of Mithra, Adonis, Attis, Dionysus, and Horus, who were all Pagan Sons of God, born centuries before Jesus.” Though the author includes historical information to back up the conversations, he doesn’t always cite his sources, and there are no endnotes in the book which might help make his case. He also includes a section on marketing and Christianity that highlights famous religious “scams”; though interesting and thematically linked, it seems out of place. Hillhouse’s attempt to link Paul or Jesus and their teachings with Jim Jones or the Heavenly Gate cult in San Diego is a huge logical leap and needs more fleshing out.
Readers may be unconvinced by these theories.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1837-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2011
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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