Because the author blasts George W. Bush and others who, in her view, wish to introduce more religion into government,...
As men of the Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers were not conventionally religious; they did not want the United States to be a “Christian nation.”
Allen, a journalist and literary critic (Artistic License: Three Centuries of Good Writing and Bad Behavior, 2004), has academic credentials (Ph.D., Columbia Univ.) and employs them vigorously in her analysis of the religious experiences and beliefs of six American icons: Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton. Not one of them, she argues, was a devout Christian, and Franklin and Jefferson, in fact, were agnostic. All of them struggled to keep religion out of public discourse and to prevent religious beliefs from becoming a qualification for public service. (She notes that no national politician today would dare declare himself or herself anything other than a pious Christian or, in a few cases, Jew.) Allen offers a counter to Michael Novak and Jana Novak’s Washington’s God (Mar. 2006), which argues that Washington, though publicly reticent about religion, was privately pious. No way, she says. She notes that the framers of the Constitution included no references to God or Jesus in that document. Allen chides Hamilton for being the first to encourage candidates to play upon the religious biases of voters. Her penultimate chapter deals with religion in American since 1787, and she ends with a primer in 18th-century history. In it, Allen explains latitudinarianism, Unitarianism and Deism and provides snapshots of the intellectual founding fathers of the Enlightenment—Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, et al. She worries today about a retreat from Reason. Allen’s style can be off-putting. She elected to use the Fathers’ own words to buttress the walls of her argument, but she quotes so often—and at such length—that her voice sometimes disappears; lithic chunks of others’ prose impede the pleasant flow of her style.
Because the author blasts George W. Bush and others who, in her view, wish to introduce more religion into government, Allen’s work—substantial and scholarly as it is—will appeal principally to those with more moderate or liberal religious and political views.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2006
ISBN: 1-56663-675-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
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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