The North American College in Rome, an all-male bastion of Catholic seminarians from the US, provides the setting for this uncritically admiring narrative of evolving priestly vocations. Murphy, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist with the Associated Press in Rome, follows the spiritual paths of six seminarians entering the North American College—the New Men of the title—as they unfold over the course of a year. The narrative, based on personal interviews with the students, sets the story of their lives against the looming but deliberately muted backdrop of Rome and the Vatican. The drama of the stories lies in the conflict they show between the calling of a parish priest and the opposing lures of secular achievement, romantic love, or—in the one intriguing case here of seemingly dual vocation—life in a Benedictine monastery. In their self-questioning, some of the students uncover for both themselves and the reader how fine the line can be between the purely self-willed and the purportedly God-given; but whether by authorial design or the students' own omission, their thoughts go oddly unillumined by the Catholic Church's rich intellectual heritage, which seems to play hardly any role in their spiritual lives. By contrast, a whole chapter is devoted to the college's yearly flag football game, and part of another to the grisly story of a school-prankish slaughter of chickens. Perhaps such stories, too tedious to tell about a college fraternity house, gain interest from their seminary context. But secular readers curious about the moral psychology of priestliness, and the vocation to goodness in the modern world, will do better to read the classic work of fiction on these topics: George Bernanos's The Diary of a Country Priest. Murphy wants to show the humanity and dignity of priestly calling; but the mood he favors, in so doing, of sentimental machismo—heartstrings loosened by a can of beer—will appeal to only a limited audience.
Pub Date: Oct. 13, 1997
ISBN: 0-399-14328-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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