A thorough, thoughtful look at wisdom suitable for both men and women.
The relationship between women and wisdom is explored with precision and insight in this well-reasoned inspirational book.
Lee’s debut notes that while patriarchs are often mentioned by name in the Bible, many females remain nameless. Historically, men have held power and leadership roles in the world, she says, but in the past 100 years, those limitations have in some cases disappeared as women have proven they’re as smart, driven and successful as men. Yet while a woman’s role in society has changed, a woman’s role in the church has often remained a lesser one, Lee argues. After studying and praying about how often wisdom is personified as female in Proverbs 3 and 8 of the Bible, Lee now believes this personification is much more than just a literary device. She traces women’s wisdom—and sometimes the lack thereof—beginning with “The Fall” in the Garden of Eden, offering thoughts about exactly where and when Adam and Eve were when they ate the forbidden fruit as well as the culpability of each. Lee uses women from the Bible to show that not every woman is a woman of wisdom. She compares Deborah, the wise woman and fourth judge in Israel, with Delilah, the Philistine courtesan who betrayed Samson for 1,100 pieces of silver. Like many inspirational writers, Lee analyzes the Bible’s famous “Proverbs 31 Woman,” but she delivers few new insights here. The most practical part of the book examines wisdom and foolishness in women today. Lee finds wisdom, for instance, in women who refrain from sexual sin and choose not to dress provocatively. She finds foolishness in women who obsess over money and focus on material things. “It is frightening to recall that the only apostle who obtained riches while following Jesus was Judas Iscariot,” she writes. Though Lee focuses on wisdom as a woman, she’s inclusive, making it clear that—as with her examples of Solomon and Moses—wisdom is for men, too.
A thorough, thoughtful look at wisdom suitable for both men and women.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490802770
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2015
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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