The moral here: Spirituality can transcend religion, but stick with the right accessories.
Directed by self-admitted “deep whim,” novelist (Zombie, 2000, etc.) and biographer (City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara, 1993) Gooch profiles Americans seeking personal spirituality apart from mainstream denominational options.
From the Urantia Book (supposedly dictated by extraterrestrials to a 1920s Chicago businessman) to high-profile Hinduism, ascetic Catholic monasticism, breakaway gay congregations, and new followers of Islam, Gooch delves into today’s more exotic worshipful styles. He lets his interviews reveal searches for a personal connection to God that begin (and often end) with a certain quality of ritual, postulating that mainstream Judeo-Christian denominations don’t provide it anymore. Departure from the Latin mass and other Catholic modernizations lumped under the rubric “Vatican II,” abandonment of the King James Bible, and similar efforts by denominational leaders to make institutional religion more accessible have instead made personal contact with God seem more remote to many, states the author. Thus the trappings of the guru and the furnishings of the ashram are essential in attracting the kind of high-media-profile, cash-contributing converts who will underwrite the flourishing of Eastern styles of mysticism as envisioned by, say, Deepak Chopra in America. Having written for Out magazine, Gooch is hypersensitive to gender-orientation triggers. Particularly while visiting monks in a Trappist monastery near Bardstown, Kentucky, he asks straightforward questions about their lives and gets at least some frank answers. In his view, the gay congregations who now support the burgeoning Metropolitan Community Churches, including the grand-scale Cathedral of Hope planned for Dallas, may despise the conservative faithful but still fervently embrace the faith. Of his own search, Gooch notes from his diary, “I chanted with the Sufis on Friday and was back on Sunday morning taking Communion at St. John’s in the Village.”
The moral here: Spirituality can transcend religion, but stick with the right accessories.Pub Date: April 9, 2002
ISBN: 0-679-44709-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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