A likable tour of scripture, though a bit too faux-naïve.
An unpromising setup—the Bible is different from the Classics Illustrated version, mostly because God is so irritable—yields a lightweight but humorous, pleasing read.
“I believe in God,” writes Slate editor Plotz (The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank, 2005), “but only in a please-please-please-desperation-prayer kind of way.” Going through the pages of the Old Testament while at a cousin’s bat mitzvah, he recalls, he discovered that he had an incomplete view of the Bible. Genesis 34, for instance, tells a story of rape, avarice, revenge and murder—and that’s just a few pages into the Good Book. Similarly, the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah “makes the Jerry Springer Show look like a Cabbage Patch picnic.” Plotz resolutely steers into pop-culture territory whenever possible, unafraid of the ephemeral. Mordecai Richler does a better job with Job in Joshua Then and Now, but Plotz hits on a solid observation. Job, he says, is exemplary of “the messy Bible,” that is, “a story that’s far more complicated, ambiguous, and confusing than its popular version.” Rabbis and preachers have found full-time employment cleaning up and explaining away those messes, for God does not always behave logically. For one thing, Plotz notes, He came up with creepy-crawly things on two successive days of creation, and he’s famously quick to smite, rain down plague and do other unpleasant things. Still, Plotz writes, “One of the revelations I’ve had in reading the Bible is that its most famous passages are almost always its most loving ones.” Amid the wisecracks, the author raises some good points, especially this one: “Jews endured because our book endured.”
A likable tour of scripture, though a bit too faux-naïve.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-137424-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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