A vibrant, if sometimes troubling, scriptural interpretation of mankind’s beginnings.
A short explication on Christian themes that uses a verse from the Book of Revelation as a springboard.
In the King James Version of the Bible, Revelation 12:11 says: “And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb, and by the word of their testimony; and they loved not their lives unto the death.” Debut author Foster uses this verse as “the Rosetta stone for unraveling the truths found only in the Word of God.” He expounds on a wide range of thought-provoking issues, from the ultimate beginnings of the human soul (“Heaven is a real and physical universe,” he writes, “and we have all been there; it is our point of origin”) to what he sees as the biblical foreshadowing of such events as the Big Bang, to the nature of matter and antimatter. “There seems to be no end of correlating Scripture with the sciences of today,” he writes, as he does just that. He extends his prophecy-based musings from science to cultural history, asserting that Great Britain and the United States once shared a land mass known as Pangaea, and that through this inheritance, America became “the country of Jesus Christ” and, more problematically, the British Empire “fits Jesus’ description of the nation to receive the kingdom of God.” “In [the Gospel of] Matthew the kingdom of God was taken from the Jew and given to the British Empire,” Foster asserts, even though nothing even remotely like this occurs in that text. Likewise, when he flatly states that the United States was “founded on the Ten Commandments of God in the city of Philadelphia as a Christian nation,” readers familiar with the First Amendment may raise an eyebrow. That said, the passionate personal conviction of these meditations is undeniable; when the author says that the magnitude of these revelations stunned him, readers will readily believe it. However, their final form here might have benefited from deeper explanation.
A vibrant, if sometimes troubling, scriptural interpretation of mankind’s beginnings.Pub Date: June 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499235876
Page Count: 58
Publisher: The Emerald Rainbow
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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