Wilson’s self-important, overly dramatic approach overshadows the significant questions he raises.
Move over, Dan Brown, there’s a new Jesus conspiracy theorist in town.
Jesus having a wife and child is nothing, asserts Wilson (Humanities and Religious Studies/York Univ.). The real secret is what he terms “the Jesus Cover-Up.” The original “Jesus Movement” led by James, the author avers, was eventually overtaken by Paul and his fabricated “Christ Movement,” which stripped Jesus of his Jewishness and de-emphasized his teachings. Paul, described by Wilson as “a Jewish dropout,” catered to the “God-fearers” of his time, gentiles who admired Judaism but were hesitant to fully convert. Paul’s version of Jesus as deified Christ was in marked contrast to the Jesus-as-teacher-cum-messiah held by the original Jesus Movement in Jerusalem. If Wilson is to be believed, Paul was the greatest con artist of all time, inventing a new religion and propelling it into eventual prominence. The Book of Acts is basically complete fiction, asserts the author, written by one of Paul’s followers to graft the two movements together in the popular conscience; the attempt worked so well that everyone has been deceived for centuries. Wilson identifies many intriguing ambiguities in Christian scripture, but he is not the first to point them out, and his lurid prose detracts from his conclusions. Proclaiming that “Paul was obsessed with the foreskin” or comparing early struggles between forms of Christianity to marketing wars between Coca-Cola and Pepsi, he seems more interested in catering to readers’ thirst for sensationalism rather than in reviving their understanding of Jesus as a faithful Jew. The book is targeted to those who have not studied religious history. The author assumes that readers may not realize that Jesus and his earliest disciples were Jewish, something even the most unread pew-warmer usually knows.
Wilson’s self-important, overly dramatic approach overshadows the significant questions he raises.Pub Date: March 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-36278-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2007
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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