An earnest, well-intentioned project likely to interest readers intrigued by the end times, despite its limited fatidic power
Booker’s debut collection attempts to share the epiphany he reached when returning to Christianity after a 21-year lapse.
The end of the world is nigh, perhaps. Enlivened by questions surrounding the end-of-times prophecy, and piqued by the rebirth of a physical Israel, Booker found himself devouring a series of books on the Bible and the second coming of Christ. These forays into popular eschatology awakened in him the sense that prophets, when discussing the days leading up to an apocalypse, were talking about the present day. In an effort to alert the world to his discovery, he began writing this series of letters to share the scriptural revelations he’d uncovered. The letters and their supporting material were written in the early ’90s, and some of the horrors they anticipate are no longer easily conceivable. It’s a persistent distraction that many of the current events Booker explores are no longer current. Readers may also find it hard to reconcile his prophetic credentials with pronouncements as factually incorrect, and as topically diverse, as a declaration that Catholics worship Mary, the New Testament was written by people who knew Jesus directly, the Jews killed Jesus, and Adam and Eve lived 6,000 years ago. The arguments are even less likely to compel readers whom he repeatedly calls “lost”—Jews, Israelis, Catholics, Arabs, Muslims, etc. Though the text seems devoid of genuine malice, the misunderstandings and misrepresentations of these traditions, along with the blunt anticipations of their demise, can be off-putting. The sincerity and colloquialisms are intermittently charming but overshadowed by general disorganization, grammatical imprecision and frequent bibliographic errors.
An earnest, well-intentioned project likely to interest readers intrigued by the end times, despite its limited fatidic powerPub Date: Nov. 29, 2002
ISBN: 978-1403365491
Page Count: 108
Publisher: 1st Book Library
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2012
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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