A great conversation starter with plenty of room for more research and elaboration.
Boin (Ancient and Late Antique Mediterranean History/Saint Louis Univ.; Ostia in Late Antiquity, 2013) puts forth a different perception of early Roman Christians and their effects on the empire.
Whereas Edward Gibbon and many scholars after him have concluded or assumed that the fall of Rome came about due to Christian influence and intolerance, Boin posits that there is little truth in that finding. Whereas many view Christianity as toppling old religions in Rome in the wake of Constantine’s conversion, the author argues that the empire remained religiously diverse for many years after that event. In this brief volume, Boin especially focuses on the Christians who lived seemingly uneventful lives, separating their faith practices from life within an emperor-focused, polytheistic society. These people may not have ended up in history books, but they did drive the normalization of Christianity in the Mediterranean basin. “By virtue of their creative resilience, not their zealotry,” writes the author, “they accomplished the most fundamental thing of all: they taught their Roman friends and neighbors to see Christians in a less threatening light.” Boin hopes to convince readers that Christian persecution was sporadic and in many ways restrained by Roman standards. Furthermore, when Constantine entered the church, the effect on Christianity may have been profound, but the effect on the empire was negligible. The author provides some thought-provoking points and successfully begins a dialogue with conventional wisdom on this subject. However, considering the breadth of his subject matter—spanning four centuries, the length of an empire and every socioeconomic class—it would be prudent for Boin to embark upon a lengthier, more scholarly treatment of his thesis. Attempting to tie his arguments in with current events—such as the selection of the current pope—the author fumbles, but overall, the book is accessible and intriguing.
A great conversation starter with plenty of room for more research and elaboration.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1620403174
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
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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