A warning derived from hidden biblical codes should prove irresistible to Christian fans with a Da Vinci Code sweet tooth.
A work offers a numerological deciphering of the Book of Revelation.
The latest book from Torckler (The Millennial Code, 2012) takes 2014 as a pivotal year in human history. It was then that former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed the National Security Agency’s massive, global data-harvesting policies, which had been hidden from the public until then. This now constitutes, in Torckler’s mind, a sign of “the beginning of the end of the Christian churches’ legal freedom to operate as a morals-based church entity we’ve enjoyed and assumed with the full rights of tax freedom.” The author looks to the standard biblical sources for End of Days calculations, the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation. He hopes his elucidations will “switch the light on” in his readers’ imaginations, alerting them to the possibility that the apocalyptic predictions made in Scripture might be coming true at this moment. The prerequisites for these revelations should be familiar to students of Christian eschatology: a charismatic dictator will be aided in his rise to power by a mega-city called Babylon (not to be confused with the historical city of the same name) and will bring the entire world under one despotic rule. Torckler, writing “not as a professor but as a poet,” sifts through biblical clues using a simple cipher that assigns a number value to each letter of the alphabet: 1 for a, 2 for b, etc. This cipher gives the author an obviously generous amount of interpretational leeway, and in the nature of such analyses, he makes the most of that latitude when rolling out his speculations (“beast is used fourteen times in chapter 13 and thirty-seven times in the book of Revelation”—and many pages of the like). Christian readers should find Torckler’s energetic prose engaging, and his underlying contentions about a looming global hive mind (he notes Google’s recent prediction that the entire world will be online by 2020) add contemporary spice to his conjectures.
A warning derived from hidden biblical codes should prove irresistible to Christian fans with a Da Vinci Code sweet tooth.Pub Date: July 21, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5127-4683-9
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2016
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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