A dense and important end-times study that offers serious, credible challenges to long-standing scriptural readings.
An exhaustive depiction of the end times.
“Truth never changes,” Marie writes in this work of systematic scriptural analysis, “and it can usually be verified by an objective mind which impartially examines the evidence.” The truth her book seeks to verify is the precise, virtually day-to-day calendar of the events that will transpire in this Christian conception of the end of time and creation. Verification might seem like a tall order, and the task gets trickier in light of the 2,000 years of scholarly disagreement about the meanings of key biblical verses. In particular, Marie focuses on Daniel 9:25, translated in the King James Version as: “Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous time.” Marie takes readers step by step through not only a deconstruction of this verse, but also a searching analysis of how it differs in key ways from other translations. The New Revised Standard, for instance, has the crucial words “there shall be seven weeks; and for sixty-two weeks it shall be built again,” thus separating rather than adding the two durations. Marie’s main concern is correcting what she views as centuries of misinterpretation that takes each week in Daniel to be a metaphor for seven years; she holds that the original text calls for a different reading, one in which those contested weeks are actually composed of normal days. With meticulous care, she supports this reading with a wide-ranging analysis of Scripture that’s confidently done, though it will quickly leave the general reader behind: this is specific eschatology for serious students of the subject. Those interested and up to speed will be both intrigued and impressed.
A dense and important end-times study that offers serious, credible challenges to long-standing scriptural readings.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490867700
Page Count: 268
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2015
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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