An ambitious but unsatisfying intellectual history of the quest for the historical Jesus by a contributing editor to Lingua Franca. Despite the subtitle, Allen’s point is actually that this quest reveals far more about those who engage in it than it does about a distant man from Galilee. Rejecting, for instance, theories that Jesus was black or a feminist, she writes, —the search for the ‘historical— Jesus in the end has yielded a figure who is not historical at all, and to whom historical reality is irrelevant.— She attempts to document the —historical quest— impulse in nearly all its incarnations in Western culture in the past 2,000 years, skipping from Roman emperors to German Romantics to contemporary iconoclasts like John Dominic Crossan. Along the way, we make some interesting incidental discoveries but get lost in the sheer weight of this undertaking. The author also neglects the larger question of why different philosophers, from wildly divergent cultural contexts, have resorted to the same demythologizing impulse again and again. There is surely a significant parallel, for example, in Thomas Jefferson’s careful trimming of all miracles out of his New Testament and the contemporary Jesus Seminar’s relentless pursuit of his authentic sayings. That said, some of her jagged chapters contain fruitful insights. Particularly intriguing is her discussion of Joseph Ernest Renan’s —cinematic Jesus,— a feminized, sensual creature whose portrayal benefited from Renan’s friendship with the lascivious Gustave Flaubert. Throughout, though, Allen’s tone is too harsh for her subjects, especially those still living. Elisabeth SchÅssler Fiorenza is ridiculed for presenting Jesus as —an androgynous personage of feminist leanings,— while other feminists —have re-constructed a re-imagined historical Jesus on the cross as a woman suffering from menstrual cramps.— There are some perceptive moments here, but the vast scope of the project and its occasional biases overshadow Allen’s obvious erudition.
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-82725-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
