Elegant and well annotated: of considerable interest to students of the church fathers and doctors.
Fourth and last volume (after Saint Augustine’s Sin, 2003, etc.) of classicist/historian Wills’s translation of Augustine’s Confessions, a key document of the early church.
Did Augustine really all of a sudden cast off paganism and sin suddenly and come to embrace Christianity in that Milanese garden way back in a.d. 386? According to the Confessions, he did: He and friend Alypius were entertaining a visitor who filled their heads with tales about St. Anthony and the Christian ascetics, suddenly Augustine felt overwhelmed by his failure to take up the rigors of the faith, not least of them celibacy. Tormented, he repaired to the garden—gardens being the site of many important happenings in the life of Jesus and his followers—and looked into his soul: “So sick was I, so tortured,” he writes, “as I reviled myself more bitterly than ever, churning and chafing in my chains, held more loosely now, but still held.” Hearing a voice telling him to read, Augustine adds, he turned the Bible to Romans 13, with its quite explicit instructions to give up the usual sins: “Clothe yourself in Jesus Christ the Lord, leaving no further allowance for fleshly desires.” Et voilà!: a future saint was born. Well, says Wills, it’s a powerful story, but a story all the same: Augustine had already converted, and there probably was not much suddenness to be had except as suited the needs of the narrative, which demands its own road to Damascus. “The pull,” he writes, “came from the fact that he was not simply accepting Christianity but aspiring to be a Christian philosopher,” later adding that the Confessions are better read as a work of theology rather than as an autobiography per se, “a larger testimony that celebrates the word of God more than the life of Augustine.”
Elegant and well annotated: of considerable interest to students of the church fathers and doctors.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03352-9
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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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