Accounts of dreams, waking visions, and near-death experiences featuring the figure of Jesus, with a running commentary by psychotherapist Sparrow. Sparrow (Lucid Dreams, not reviewed) believes that many people dream of Jesus and that these dreams play an important role in their psychological growth. Here he offers a large number of personal testimonies, based on more than five years of research in the United States. He divides his material into seven chapters, dealing with such topics as initial encounters with the Christ figure, physical and emotional healings, and confrontations bringing about a change of attitude during the experience itself. We read of visions in which individuals are personally addressed by Jesus and inundated with light, and of healings, as in the case of a woman who, after her dream of Jesus, found she could experience orgasm without fear. The reports are brief, and Sparrow's text links them together, as he points up significant themes and inspirational lessons. His book is a celebration of the kind of American religiosity that values individual experience more than the experience and wisdom handed down through the centuries of tradition. Sparrow's Jesus can be whoever we want him to be, the Buddha, or even a ``luminous form'' of ourselves. The result is a vapid, androgynous figure in flowing robes who essentially reassures. Sparrow fudges when he claims that he is not writing theology but goes on to equate his stories uncritically with the New Testament appearances of Jesus. Furthermore, he mentions such Christian teachers as St. Teresa of Avila and St. Ignatius Loyola but refers neither to their important criteria for evaluating visions nor to their warnings against the very real psychological and spiritual danger of delusion in such matters. Superficial treatment of a significant religious and psychological theme.
Pub Date: March 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-553-09713-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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