Will it prevent John Paul’s beatification? Not likely.
A tedious tale of fascist cabals, freemasonic conspiracies, perverts lurking under every cassock and a pope glad to invent a heroic past and preserve a hidebound one.
If you are disposed to think Catholicism evil, then Yallop’s book will doubtless please. The opening chapters rework his hypothesis, from In God’s Name (1984), that John Paul I was poisoned because he knew too much about the financial crimes within the Vatican and wanted to make appropriate reforms; John Paul II not only tossed aside those reforms, Yallop asserts, but also freed the gnomes to do as they wished, so that “while the Holy Father roundly condemned apartheid, the Vatican Bank was secretly loaning $172 million to official agencies of the South African apartheid regime.” The Vatican Bank, of course, was not the only lender to rightist regimes, and Yallop charges John Paul II with hypocrisy for ignoring the crimes of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes outside Eastern Europe. Strange behavior, that, considering that Yallop also asserts that the pope was no real enemy of communism and that the Polish communist regime was “instrumental in setting him on the path to St. Peter’s throne.” Much of the book is a lurid catalog of incidents of sexual abuse and pedophilia proven and alleged, with Yallop charging that the pope and his minions did nothing to stop the priests. Much of the rest is given over to charges that John Paul II invented and padded his resume; thus, “the claims made over many years about Wojtyla’s wartime actions on behalf of Jews are a fantasy without any foundation.” But this book has little grounding, either; lacking substantial documentation and reliant on supposed anonymous sources inside the Vatican subject to supposed curial inquisitions, it is an extended and rhetorically predictable rumor. And a grinding, aggrieved one at that.
Will it prevent John Paul’s beatification? Not likely.Pub Date: May 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1956-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2007
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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