A recondite subject rendered fresh and accessible.
Jesus College fellow Soskice (The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language, 2008, etc.) examines the life and work of the little-known sister “bible-hunters” who unearthed many significant ancient manuscripts.
The book is as much about academic controversies surrounding biblical scholarship during the Victorian era as it is about the two proto-feminist twins, Agnes and Margaret Smith. Born to a prosperous father in Irvine, Scotland, the Smith sisters were rigorously educated in the Presbyterian faith, physically robust and eager to travel, making their first adventurous trek to Egypt upon the death of their father in 1866. They taught themselves Arabic and Greek. Agnes began to study Syriac—a dialect of Middle Aramaic—in preparation for travels to Sinai to dig for early texts of Christianity that might have been overlooked by adventurer-scholars such as Constantin von Tischendorf. The possibility that there might be texts still hidden in St. Catherine’s monastery, at the foot of Mt. Sinai, was first introduced to the sisters by J. Rendel Harris, an oriental-studies scholar at Cambridge, where the sisters had relocated after the deaths of their respective husbands. Encouraged, the twins set off in 1892 for St. Catherine’s, which housed a wondrous library. There Agnes discovered that underneath a manuscript about the lives of saints existed another, much older text, a palimpsest that would prove to be the earliest known copy of the Gospels in Syriac. Subsequent trips to Sinai in the company of Cambridge scholars led to more marvelous discoveries, as well as attempts to reassign credit among them all. Though the sisters were originally viewed as merely eccentric women, Soskice effectively demonstrates their important contributions to biblical scholarship in the 19th century.
A recondite subject rendered fresh and accessible.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4133-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2009
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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