An imaginative but somewhat stilted portrait of a mechanistic yet gushingly self-aware world.
Divine grace begets astrophysics in this grandiose cosmological fantasia.
Ruetz, a Catholic priest and eco-communitarian, offers this fable as a mythic reconciliation of Christian-ish themes with scientific theories of the Big Bang and evolution. In the beginning, it seems, there was a Quaternity of one God in four Persons: Elohim, his wife Sophia, their son Dabar and a feminine Holy Spirit called Ruah. Their heavenly bliss needs constructive outlets, and before you can say “Through our ecstatic love, we will create space-time as a home in which these possible new creations will live,” a 100-trillion-trillion-degree “red bubble-womb” erupts. As the new universe cools, the laws of physics takes over, anthropomorphized by a Disneyesque cast of talking subatomic particles, including the squabbling trio of Quarkie, Quarko and Quarkoff and an alliterative photon named Photie. (Sample soliloquy: “Felicitous, faithful friends, potent perseverance calls you to fastidious fidelity.”) They conduct us on a 15 billion-year narrative in which gas clouds coalesce into galaxies and heavy atomic nuclei are synthesized in supernovae and they gravitate to the nascent Earth. Despite the long-winded dialogue, Ruetz’s fable imparts interesting lore about the developing universe at a level that young readers can digest. Unfortunately, kids and adults may get lost in the story’s second half, which bogs down in details of molecular biology—“First, let us build an RNA messenger made of nucleotide bases from our free-floating raw materials and RNA bases”—as loquacious atoms plan the evolution of bacteria into eukaryotic cells. Throughout, Ruetz blends theology into the science: the fundamental forces of physics are but elaborations of a primordial impulse toward love and fellowship, while free will makes the cosmos open-ended rather than deterministic (dangerously so for a hydrogen atom whose sinful pride draws him toward a black hole). Neither scientists nor religious traditionalists are likely to be swayed by Ruetz’s vision, but it may resonate with those of a determinedly ecumenical mindset.
An imaginative but somewhat stilted portrait of a mechanistic yet gushingly self-aware world.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1440188404
Page Count: 388
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2010
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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