A pleasing read if you’re inclined toward the authors’ selective views. Otherwise, the four Gospels will do just fine.
Conservative commentator O’Reilly, working with frequent collaborator Dugard (Killing Kennedy, 2012, etc.), settles on yet another liberal victim of politically motivated killing.
Though O’Reilly has protested that Jesus Christ is above politics when the question turns uncomfortably to giving away everything to the poor, he’s quite happy to suggest that Jesus was killed because, among other things fiscal, “he interrupted the flow of funds from the Temple to Rome when he flipped over the money changer’s tables.” It probably didn’t help that he proclaimed himself to be the son of God, but, write the authors, it’s more that the lineage of Jesus and Annas the bad priest had been bound up for generations, the one hardworking and steadfast, the other a debauched class of bureaucrats who took a cut of the temple action in the form of “taxes extorted from the people of Judea,” sending a hefty cut back to the bosses in Rome. Jesus was the original tea party protestor, and never mind all that rendering unto Caesar business (or, for that matter, the Sermon on the Mount). O’Reilly has said that the Holy Spirit directed him to write this book, and we must suppose that that particular tine of the Trinity has it in for the Pharisees, whom religious historians are inclined these days to treat more sympathetically than do the authors. A virtue of the book is that O’Reilly and Dugard employ a broad range of ancient sources; a detriment is that they seem to regard these sources overly credulously and follow them into long asides (including enough of a recap of events to break this book into two: Killing Jesus and Killing Julius Caesar). Otherwise, the book has some novelistic, noirish touches, as if the New Testament had been mashed up with some lost pages of Erle Stanley Gardner.
A pleasing read if you’re inclined toward the authors’ selective views. Otherwise, the four Gospels will do just fine.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9854-9
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
IN THE NEWS
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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