by James M. Ault ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2004
Informative and well-informed documentation of how faith is made to fit.
Documentary filmmaker Ault unearths the everyday codes that direct the lives of a conservative Christian community and the intensity of emotions embodied in their concept of being “born again.”
This grew out of the author’s experiences while making the award-winning documentary Born Again in the mid-1980s. His sojourn with the members of the Shawmut River Baptist Church (not its real name) in Worcester, Massachusetts, took a long time to write about, Ault states, primarily because it prompted a personal journey to a level of Christian conviction that he, raised the son of a mainstream Methodist minister, had not known before. But the text also sprang from his concern that intellectuals were often dealing with the fundamentalist movement, and dismissing it as flawed scholarship, without any exposure to its interaction with local communities. How do believers at the ground level, Ault asked himself, stand so firmly on concepts like inerrancy of Scripture and moral absolutism against the onslaught of scientific discovery and the drift toward freedom of individual thought in this country? The power of this work comes from the details based on Ault’s depth of immersion and freedom to observe social interaction among the Shawmut members, for whom an oral tradition of biblical bytes for every occasion reinforces total rejection of “phoolosophy” (secular learning) and a close support group that knits together a community to help any member struggling with a broken marriage, unemployment, sickness, etc. Revelations? Fundamentalists do change their thinking, Ault observes, but always veil the changes. For example, “interpretations of Noah’s cursing the descendants of Ham, in Genesis, as biblical justification [for] racial segregation fell . . . quietly out of sight in the Seventies.” His conclusion: fundamentalist movements (not mentioning Islam by name) based on sacred texts can survive in the modern world indefinitely.
Informative and well-informed documentation of how faith is made to fit.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-375-40242-X
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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More About This Book
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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