An effective Everyman story of finding salvation.
A novel about one young man’s quest for spiritual fulfillment.
“If we lived in a perfect world, that’s what it would be: perfect.” This seemingly simple realization comes to Joe Klempkin only after a great many tribulations. When Bowman’s fast-paced, intriguing debut begins, Joe is at loose ends and “a decision away from being on the street.” Then he begins to have supernatural experiences. First, he’s tempted by a mysterious, threatening apparition, then he has a vision: hordes of people trying and failing to scale a mountain, many of them falling to their doom. A voice asks, “Do you want to be like them?” In order to avoid this fate, Joe embarks on a spiritual quest. Bowman gets this quest off to a gimmicky start—a bookstore clerk tells Joe and his friend Larry that the store doesn’t carry Bibles, for instance—but in a series of swiftly done scenes, Joe and Larry proceed from the mystical figure of Caroline the Prophet to Abigail, who just may be Joe’s one true love (and who tells her listeners, “Faith is believing you can achieve anything you set your mind to—if you don’t give up”). Along the way, Larry acts as counselor and sounding board for Joe’s grasping, inarticulate faith, warning Joe about Satan—“Old Slewfoot,” who “not only lies about everything, but if he convinces you either way, he will turn on you and accuse you for it”—and urging him, “If you believe there is a God, then seek Him.” Through Larry and a succession of other characters, Bowman dramatizes Joe’s becoming familiar with the Bible and gradually coming to understand the nature of his religious belief in time to deal with the real consequences of unbelief. As he tells a doubting character late in the novel: “There really is a hell. I’ve seen it.” In a nicely done concluding act, Joe uses his newfound faith to help him through a personal loss, which Bowman handles with low-key emotion.
An effective Everyman story of finding salvation.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4908-6169-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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