Yet another history of millennialism and prophecy belief, shallow but a cut slightly above its peers. One of the strangest claims in Weber’s usually on-target chronicle is that millennialism is understudied and “for so long ignored in modern times.” The recent onslaught of books on the topic, many of which Weber seems to have read, testify to the contrary. Weber’s book does stand out for a couple of reasons. First, since he is a historian of early modern Europe (UCLA), Weber’s analysis is heavy on continental sources and refreshingly constrained on American millennial groups, though he does briefly round up the usual suspects (Millerites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, etc.) The book is strongest when grounded in the author’s own apparent area of expertise: France in the 18th century. Weber’s study also begins in a memorable way, with an intriguing opening discussion of the very concept of a century. Weber notes that the idea of marking time in centuries dates only to the 17th century and didn’t become popular until the 18th, so the notion that belief in apocalypse has always been tied to a millennial year is anachronistic. Weber is a terrific writer for an academic, coining fun new words such as “billennium” for the year 2000 and “the enserfed” for the heathen masses. But such mellifluous prose seems wasted on this overhyped, tired topic. The book spreads itself too thin, attempting to function as a “travel guide” through 2,000 years of (mostly Christian) millennialism, from St. Paul to the Nation of Islam. In journalistic fashion, Weber skips lightly from one example to another without exploring the deeper histories of these movements. Certainly entertaining, but Weber’s obvious skill is squandered in this superficial treatment of a hackneyed subject.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-674-04080-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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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