Fruitful if sometimes exasperating: worthy of shelf space next to Jack Miles’s God and Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.
A wide-ranging biography of the patriarch and prophet who sallied forth from Mesopotamia swinging an iconoclastic hammer and earning himself a hallowed place in three world religions.
Biblical scholars have puzzled over Abram/Abraham for generations, debating whether he really wandered thousands of miles to preach a vision of the one true God and if he nearly sacrificed his son Isaac or actually did sacrifice the boy. (“A thread of tradition hints that the Binding of Isaac, contrary to what the Bible seems to say, did not end happily,” observes the author.) Former National Review editor Klinghoffer (The Lord Will Gather Me In, not reviewed) does a good job of sorting out the many, often conflicting interpretations. He assumes, with due qualification, that Abraham was a real person, born near Baghdad some 38 centuries ago, not long before Nimrod decreed that a ziggurat be built to storm the heavens and make war on God. Though he protests that he is not a fundamentalist, Klinghoffer seems to accept that the key events in Abraham’s life went pretty much as the Old Testament would have it. The author’s view of the prophet is appropriately awestruck, though he accords Abraham a full measure of humanity and mortal failings, all complicated by “a somewhat difficult wife” and a rather testy, unforgiving nature. Klinghoffer assumes that monotheism is a true and good thing in itself, venturing to suggest that believers in God writ large are ipso facto more moral than animists or polytheists. He also assumes, and here his argument grows a bit fuzzy, that “the household of Abraham” offers the one paradigm that can get Jews, Christians, and Muslims to stop killing one another in the name of God—a bit of wishful thinking that Bruce Feiler’s tougher-minded Abraham (2002) eschews.
Fruitful if sometimes exasperating: worthy of shelf space next to Jack Miles’s God and Sigmund Freud’s Moses and Monotheism.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-49973-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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