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THE EVOLUTION OF ADAM

Name: THE EVOLUTION OF ADAM
Author: Dan Ford
ISBN: 978-1500467203

by Dan Ford ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 30, 2014

An ambitious, fascinating novel about spiritual powers—and the kind of threats with which only those powers can clash.

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Religious fiction in which a small group seeks its higher destiny.

The main action of Ford’s debut novel begins with a catastrophe in progress: An airliner on a crew-training flight to the Bahamas has been struck by a smaller craft and crippled. A co-pilot is dead; the two other pilots, Adam and Buck, are momentarily certain they’re doomed. But Adam, suddenly filled with a preternatural calm, manages to “ditch” the plane safely in the warm, shallow waters, saving Buck’s life and his own—but filling him with questions. He allays these questions by spending a blissful evening with his girlfriend, Tanya, but the mystery of what really saved the plane keeps nagging him, and he’s not alone: Buck soon contacts him, wanting to talk over what happened, certain a higher power was somehow involved. Ford’s readers will know the names of those higher powers, since Ford begins his complex, fast-moving novel with a prelude scenario in which two supernatural beings, Zenithal Spirits named Dorad and Caltron—part of that “Supreme Consciousness” that “had created all that was in existence on earth”—are responsible for humanity’s beginning. Dorad infuses a hominid animal with an essence of the eternal so that “this new creation would be called a human being and would fulfill a major role in the Creation’s plan.” Many thousands of years later, Dorad and Caltron are still watching mankind’s progress when one of their own, a powerful Spirit named Diana, has “become earthbound and has succumbed to the material pleasures and powers that she has accumulated.” In a previous incarnation, Diana was a powerful leader in the now-lost city of Atlantis. Now the book’s main plot accelerates as Buck, Adam and their group of friends—including Buck’s gay lover, Antonio, an expert in some of the supernatural things that have begun happening to the heroes, such as heightened spiritual awareness and out-of-body experiences—begin exploring underwater Bahamian ruins that seem to be those of Atlantis. From there, Ford smoothly unfurls the story, though readers may find the book’s opening third a bit meandering. Once the action picks up, however, the book becomes a thoughtful and involving read, part philosophical discussion, part Tim LaHaye–style spiritual thriller.

An ambitious, fascinating novel about spiritual powers—and the kind of threats with which only those powers can clash.

Pub Date: July 30, 2014

ISBN: 978-1500467203

Page Count: 544

Publisher: CreateSpace

Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
MASTERY
by Robert Greene

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Drake Producing 48 Laws of Power Show

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

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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.