by Diarmaid MacCulloch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2016
Experts and lay readers alike can pick and choose elements from MacCulloch’s vast store of knowledge.
Authoritative essays on the Protestant Reformation.
A recently knighted academic and acclaimed author, MacCulloch (History of the Church/Oxford Univ.; Silence: A Christian History, 2013, etc.) presents a variety of pieces on the main currents of the Reformation, published previously in scholarly and literary British journals. Grouped into three areas—Reformation elements traversing Europe, those affecting England, and those considered from a modern point of view—the essays take on large themes such as the Council of Trent, the Tudors, and the making of the King James Bible. The author frequently plunges into academic minutiae that are endlessly fascinating but will sail over the heads of nonscholars—e.g., his examination of angels and the Virgin Mary. Delighted that the subject is gaining new interest by academic researchers, MacCulloch ably conveys a sense of the ideological excitement of the era, when the majority of Western Europeans were jolted by the challenges of Martin Luther in terms of how people had considered death, salvation, and the afterlife and were “convinced that they had been cheated.” The author underscores how cracking the Catholic Church took an enormous force and thus required an equally forceful counterrevolution to meet it. In his essay on John Calvin, MacCulloch shows how he expertly distilled Catholic doctrine rather than consider himself a Protestant; as such, he could be called the fifth Latin doctor of the Church (after Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory). The author’s treatment of the Tudors is masterly, from the reign of Henry VIII, when new rebellious religious identities were emerging and Thomas Cranmer presided over the creation of the first Book of Common Prayer (1549), to Queen Elizabeth I’s delight in the church music of William Byrd and the synthesis of Anglicanism from low and high church elements.
Experts and lay readers alike can pick and choose elements from MacCulloch’s vast store of knowledge.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-061681-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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