Punchy and persuasive.
Garman fashions a forceful argument for the separation of church and state, backed up by a bevy of useful historical documents.
For Garman, there is no quibbling about church-state issues–the founding fathers intended there be a wall between religion and political life, and they wrote that intention into America’s most important historical documents. To prove his point, the author gathers and reprints those papers here, presenting readers with a selection of texts that support his effectively argued thesis. Garman does a great service by bringing together many primary-source texts crucial to understanding the American debate over church-state issues. Included in his compendium are relevant passages from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, writings from founding fathers like Madison and Jefferson, and Supreme Court decisions that engage religious issues through the 21st century. These should be required reading for combatants on either side of the debate. However, readers might have benefited from more commentary. The book’s appendices, which contain these primary documents, run to almost 200 pages, while the author’s introductory essay barely exceeds 70. Garman’s logic–while sound–is not so obvious as he would make it seem, and some might welcome more explication. One might also object to his title, The Religion Commandments, which seems to advertise an argument exactly counter to his. Indeed, we oughtn’t keep church and state separate because any document–even the Bill of Rights–commands it. Presumably, the founding fathers did not feel compelled to keep religion and political life separate, but thought it eminently reasonable to do so. This word “commandments” reeks of the totalizing religious forces that the author seems keen to avoid. But if his title is ill chosen, his argument is not, and many may walk away convinced that he is right.
Punchy and persuasive.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-1642-2
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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