Account of a highly publicized 1926 murder in Fort Worth, Texas, and the trial of accused killer J. Frank Norris, a fiery fundamentalist preacher.
Norris, whose Fort Worth church reputedly attracted more parishioners than any other in the United States during the 1920s, preached a gospel of hatred against African-Americans, Catholics and other targets. Using a newspaper he founded and a radio station, he reached audiences in a similar manner as Jerry Falwell decades later. Regularly inserting himself into controversies about the direction of Fort Worth government and business, Norris collected enemies and friends with equal aplomb. A lumber tycoon named Dexter Elliott Chipps became one of the enemies. One day in 1926, Chipps, known for his drinking, womanizing and large physical presence, called Norris at church to announce he would be walking over for a talk. When he arrived, Chipps apparently warned Norris to withdraw certain criticisms of Fort Worth leaders. Claiming to fear for his life, Norris pulled a gun and shot the unarmed Chipps dead in the church office. The criminal trial moved from Fort Worth to Austin because of prejudicial publicity. Journalists from around the nation and world covered the trial, which centered on the question of whether Norris had killed Chipps in self-defense. The jury acquitted Norris, who then remained active in fundamentalist church circles and right-wing political circles until his death in 1952. Sharing the spotlight in the narrative are the Chipps family members, church employees and congregants loyal to their minister, Fort Worth social and political big shots and well-known lawyers on both sides of the case.
Pub Date: July 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-58642-186-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Steerforth
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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