An oddly pinched view of the eternally provocative combination of religion and sex that does little justice to either, especially the latter. That sex is the new religion of the 20th century is reasonable enough as a casual observation, but Pickstone, an Anglican vicar, attempts to show such a general statement to be literally true. Reading often like a letter home from a Victorian autodidact transported into the late 20th century—and not always even that far—The Divinity of Sex, while proclaiming sex to be the new opiate of the people, engages with it only on a curiously abstract and conventionally idealized level. Spurning any investigation of actual sexual practices and attitudes, Pickstone mixes together material drawn from an unrepresentative sample of literature (especially D.H. Lawrence) and popular culture with snippets of secondhand psychology meant to represent society at large. From this grab bag of examples he draws a string of generalizations. By turns self-consciously open-minded and censorious, these observations culminate in a vague and sober call for a proper appreciation of the ``sacredness'' of sex. In the service of this thesis, distinctions between love and sex, or between relating to another person and to some transcendent ``other,'' are routinely elided. Worse, as practically any concern with existence, identity, consciousness, or even our corporeal nature is defined as essentially ``religious,'' most modern activities turn out to be new religions—including sports, art, fashion, dance, and environmentalism. The book's own evidence, especially its strongest point about the importance of the body in the post-religious imagination, simply makes it increasingly clear that secularization marks a change in self-perception much more fundamental than a new faith in sex (and that sex has always had a charged relationship with religion). Exhausting a useful metaphor, Pickstone inadvertently leaves the impression that within this momentously changed worldview, sex is probably just sex, and spirituality something else entirely.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-15516-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 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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