A helpful compendium to the heroes of the American Catholic Church.
Part devotional guide, part encyclopedia, Saints and Blesseds of the Americas will find a welcome place on the shelves of a new generation of Catholics.
Ewald’s tidy collection provides an exhaustive, country-by-country listing of all the Catholic saints and blesseds of the Western world. In Catholic theology, saints serve as intercessors between humanity and God; blesseds–those who have undergone the process of beatification–are only one step away from becoming saints. Believers pray to either for aid in any number of life pursuits. Perhaps the most gratifying aspect of this catalogue is the fact that it is extremely up to date. Ewald provides not only the saints and blesseds of old but also those recently beatified and canonized. For example, he presents the Blessed Lindalva Justo de Oliveira, martyred in 1993 and beatified by Pope Benedict XVI just last year. This is a timely reference guide at least in part because the previous pope–John Paul II–was a prolific supporter of the path to sainthood. According to the Vatican, Pope John Paul II beatified and canonized more individuals than all the popes of the past five centuries combined. Thus, Ewald fulfills an important role in bringing his devout readership up to speed. But currentness is not the volume’s only strength. Ewald paints quick but thorough sketches of his many subjects. His brief biographies never run much more than a page or two, but he has an eye for the fine points, and his portraits are always extremely pertinent–there are as few wasted details as there are wasted words. However, though his book serves best as a reference volume, it also provides a surprisingly gratifying reading experience. Ewald has the skill of a storyteller, and each biography features a neat narrative arc.
A helpful compendium to the heroes of the American Catholic Church.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-4363-6762-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 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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