A wide-ranging, ultimately quite charming personal manifesto of faith, humor and inquiry.
A series of personal reflections on the nature of faith in the modern world.
At one point in Stemmle’s gently irreverent and highly entertaining debut, one of his fictional interlocutors refers to him as “already 90% atheist,” though readers might have their doubts. Happily married, comfortably retired and congenially inquisitive, Stemmle is deceptively modest and self-deprecating, but in one of his various “puddles,” he reveals extensive reading, not only of the Bible and the great documents of Christian theology, but also of more recent literature of biblical scholarship. In a series of well-paced, smoothly written chapters, he examines various aspects of modern Christian belief—the struggles against internal doubt (and external doubters), the ease with which people resort to one-dimensional labels, and the authority of the Catholic Church, among other things. Many of his conclusions are fairly common-sense, and he saves an extra amount of railing for the fault of righteousness, which he shrewdly says “replaces the search for truth.” (It’s a mark of the book’s winning self-deprecation that Stemmle doesn’t exempt himself from this failing.) He intersperses his philosophical and theological musings with plenty of personal anecdotes and family history, ending each chapter with “Questions for Reflection and Discussion” that reveal a pedagogical impulse otherwise muted throughout the book. The highlight of his narrative comes in the sections in which Stemmle crosses swords with interview characters of his own invention—in fact, he puckishly reminds one of them, Arthur, that he’s invented—testing his knowledge and convictions against well-realized devil’s advocates; a fictional news anchor even has the four Evangelists as guests. The playful inventiveness of these sections highlights rather than obscures the essentially humanist heart of the book, expressed in many variations of Stemmle’s contention that an “informed faith is built on questioning and searching.” There’s a great deal here for readers of any faith to appreciate.
A wide-ranging, ultimately quite charming personal manifesto of faith, humor and inquiry.Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496103994
Page Count: 278
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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