A sumptuous feast of popes and kings, nimbly prepared by historian Duffy, a fellow at Magdelen College, Cambridge. This book is intended as a tie-in to a six-part British television series on the history of the papacy, scheduled to appear on the History Channel in the spring of 1998. For a companion volume, this history is surprisingly dense and sophisticated. More important, although Duffy certainly remarks on the papacy's more salacious past (like Boniface's comment that sex with boys or women was no more sinful than ``rubbing one hand against another''), he never stoops to a tabloidesque fascination with the all-too-human foibles of the pontiffs. Rather, Duffy uses the evolving institution of the papacy from Peter to John Paul II as a lens through which to view two millennia of Western civilization. He profiles the missionary activity of the early Church, the consolidation of power with the bishop of Rome (who became the acknowledged pope), the emergence of monastic reform, the schism with Constantinople, the ``Babylonian Captivity'' of the papacy in 14th-century Avignon, Luther's protest, and the Catholic Reformation that met his challenge. If the last third of the book seems to lose some of its energy, it might be because, as Duffy subtly observes, the modern papacy is a quite different institution than its predecessor. Shorn of political power and the most obvious signs of avarice, it now commands a holy respect. Duffy claims that the current pope asserts ``a spiritual status . . . greater than at any time since the high Middle Ages.'' With its 150 well-chosen illustrations, 100 of them in color, this is a coffee-table book that transcends its genre. (History Book Club selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-07332-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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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