A book that casts ineffective stones at the contemporary world.
A lay minister collects 15 years worth of writing about the Bible’s relationship to daily life to create a meditation on faith and God.
Beginning in March 1990, Yeiser began writing down his thoughts and reflections on faith, religion, the Bible and the contemporary world. These writings vary in scope, but none achieves any kind of depth–they are deliberate, but serve no purpose. The most taxing entry is comprised solely of selected passages from the Bible that relate to the concept of heaven, with the author providing no further explanation or analysis. If Yeiser doesn’t contribute any analysis, one may wonder why readers will bother. Other entries are more interesting, but the quality of the work doesn’t exactly improve. His meditations on modern phenomena like teen sex–in which he posits that the number of teen girls having premarital sex is directly related to the number of teen girls attempting suicide–definitely raise some questions. These questions, however, are not about the promiscuous, suicidal teens lambasted here, but rather the author of this out-of-touch and insensitive rumination. Throughout, Yeiser reveals–either directly or indirectly–that he’s had a hard life, including a near-death experience in 1984 and his ex-wife’s betrayal of his trust. These emerge as defining moments that shaped him into the person who’d pen this book. The author’s musings are too shallow to be considered “conservative” or “fundamentalist”–their myopic focus on religion and propriety is marked by an offensive ignorance and naïveté.
A book that casts ineffective stones at the contemporary world.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4363-6135-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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