A life-affirming glimpse into a personal world thickly populated with fantastical forces.
A wide-ranging book provides an account of many supernatural interactions.
The latest collection of insights and anecdotes from Snowdon (Touched by Angels, 2010) springs from her conviction that there are 40 angel realms in humanity’s universe and more than 200 outside it, and that she is being guided by angels to pass on their communications and help enlighten people and encourage world peace. Angels of all types and descriptions crop up throughout this volume, where they function more as supernatural forces than religious beings. Indeed, although Snowdon asserts (in a claim atheists should find familiar) that without the goodness of God, earthlings “would all be mindless creatures” who selfishly grab “whatever we can from our friends, our neighbours, and our loved ones,” the universe described here is an openly polytheistic one. Pagan deities like Apollo, Isis, and the goddess Brigid (“known to have evolved from various deities in the past to a modern-day goddess of peace and unity”) jostle for space alongside spirit guides, fairies, and unicorns (including Snowdon’s “guardian unicorn” named Greta). According to the author, this menagerie interacts with chakras, auras, and alternate dimensions, and regularly communicates with Snowdon. She sees their intercession and guidance in everything, from genetically modified foods (“GMO food has been inspired from the spirit realm because of animal-contaminated food,” she’s mystically informed. “It is the way forward for planet earth”) to random cloud formations (the book includes several photos). The writing style throughout is both accessible and enthusiastic, shifting from personal stories and anecdotes to broader mystical claims and back with ease. Snowdon ends each short chapter of this fairly standard New-Age stew with an “affirmation” (for example, “Each morning for a short while, I imagine being lifted up into a realm of angels who help keep a feeling of harmony with me through my day”). Readers will necessarily have to be of the angels-picked-my-airplane-seat-number mindset themselves to appreciate any part of the work. Snowdon’s book may very well be the only one ever published with a cover blurb by the Archangel Gabriel.
A life-affirming glimpse into a personal world thickly populated with fantastical forces.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4525-2011-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2016
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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