An intelligent, impassioned plea for religious objectivity.
Blakeson’s debut memoir relates his lifelong quest for spirituality and seeks to open up a line of communication between those who are religious and those who aren’t.
The author grew up in Kansas, in the “buckle” of the Bible Belt. Raised in a conservative Baptist family, he was teased in school and felt out of place, so he ensconced himself in the church community, the first place that he truly knew love. After some time—and the onslaught of hormones—he experienced a “growing dissonance” between his preaching and his heart. In college, he studied world religions and came to discover the importance of objectivity, which he used to view religion in all its variations. He grew to believe that no one faith holds the answer to the meaning of life or the keys to morality. By abandoning the faith that formed him, he was free to “unlearn” his indoctrination and find inner peace without the “false advertisements” of polarizing and subjective beliefs. He also realized the depression he battled all his life was the product of his search for God. The second half of Blakeson’s book deals with the lessons he learned on his roller-coaster ride and how others may break the “religious cycle” to begin their true spiritual lives. Although the author’s critiques of conservative and fundamental Christianity are the most persuasive, he also adeptly explores what he sees as the shortcomings of other world religions, observing how good Muslims he knows contradict the Quran’s more troubling passages. He also writes about the difficulty he’s had speaking honestly about conflicts in the Middle East without being “unjustly vilified as anti-Semitic.” The author can be humorous at times, such as when young Cole asks God to watch over the United States on election night in 2004. God’s reply? “No.” The next day, he found out that George W. Bush was re-elected.
An intelligent, impassioned plea for religious objectivity.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2013
ISBN: 978-1458207968
Page Count: 202
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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