A memoir of death may seem a contradiction in terms, but that is what Buechner, Presbyterian minister and prolific writer (best known for his novel Godric, 1980) has given us. Here we meet the dead who haunt his heart—his grandmother; his friend and fellow wordsmith James Merrill; his father, who committed suicide; and his brother. Buechner, trustworthy and slightly self-effacing, offers his meditations on death with a characteristically light touch. Unlike so many writers who weigh in on the ultimate questions, Buechner never winds up sounding like a pompous ass. A “hopelessly religious person,” Buechner is the doubter’s Christian, ever suspect of the believer whose faith life is not shot through with doubt. The Eyes of the Heart captures that skepticism: Without losing sight of his Christian convictions, Buechner wonders what will happen after he dies, asking his grandmother, who pooh-poohs the question, to describe being dead. Bibliophiles will enjoy The Eyes of the Heart because it is framed by a tour through Buechner’s study; we browse through his first edition Oz books and the copy of Gone With the Wind in which Buechner’s father wrote a final note to Buechner’s mother. Early in the book, Buechner tells us, “There are such wonderful books in [my study] that I expect people to tremble with excitement, as I would, on entering it for the first time, but few of them do because they don—t know or care enough about books to have any idea what they are seeing.” It seems, at first, a throwaway line, but the image stays with you as you read, for Buechner is not just referring to books, but to God and the wonder and fragility of human life as well. One hopes in the same way that readers will know what they are seeing when they pick up The Eyes of the Heart.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-251638-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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