Carefully researched but basically slanted story of one year in the life of a ``typical'' American Catholic parish. Between May 1993 and May 1994 Shapiro, a South Africanborn magazine editor and former Anglican clergyman, conducted more than 150 hours of taped interviews and attended services and meetings, both social and educational, at St. Paul's parish, Kenmore, N.Y. The result reads like a novel but is in fact a kind of documentary, with just a few name changes and about 20 characters, among whom Shapiro moves back and forth, interspersing his text with quotations from Vatican pronouncements, which he uses to spice his clearly confrontational approach. The Catholics we meet are mostly likable and discontented, such as Judy, an adult religious educator weighing her feminist views against Catholic belief, and Father Don, a young priest who leaves the Church for his male lover. Shapiro gives his material some measure of continuity by focusing on the regular group classes for would-be Catholics, and he graphically describes conflicts in both instructors and students as they move toward baptism at Easter. The reader is left wondering how the Catholic Church—or at least St. Paul's parish—carries on, as hardly anyone actually appears to believe in any meaningful way. Shapiro sees Catholicism as an alienating system that imposes its doctrinal and moral positions on people who are more or less bewildered and spiritually passive. In Shapiro's scenario, Pope John Paul (whose speeches are described as ``spiel'') frequently plays a kind of Grand Inquisitor role, especially with his 1993 reaffirmation that moral values have objective as well as subjective force. Our author presents the disaffected as heroic dissidents who are loyal to their consciences, and most of the clergy as well-fed cynics, while the token orthodox layperson looks like a clever, albeit well-intentioned, apparatchik. The author's polemical tone throughout must raise doubts about the reliability of his work. (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47293-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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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