A vividly detailed account of how Western society interpreted and was influenced by the biblical story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, by a French cultural critic and historian (Sin and Fear, not reviewed). Early Christianity tended to see Paradise in largely allegorical terms and characterize it as a place of ``rest'' where the just awaited the final judgment and their entrance into Heaven itself. As this idea waned, the Garden of Eden became conflated with Greco-Roman descriptions of a past Golden Age or a mythical earthly paradise of perpetual bliss that many thought still existed in some inaccessible region. (Adam's sin was deemed especially heinous in comparison with the blessings with which he had been surrounded.) The dream of discovering this place of delights inspired such fantasies as Sir John Mandeville's Travels and the legends of Prester John, which in turn led to the explorations of Columbus in the New World and, in Europe, to a renewed interest in gardens and the study of botany. With the advent of the Age of Reason and the discovery of fossils proving that the earth was much older than bibilical history stated, the literal interpretation of the Paradise story gradually fell out of favor, and a more symbolic view of the Garden of Eden again became necessary. Delumeau's text is a work of enormous scholarship, richly illustrated with 25 medieval maps and many quotations from primary sources throughout the centuries, and it is published here in a fine English translation. The author concludes by suggesting that the only acceptable Christian theology of Paradise today is that of second- century writers, who do not assign ``an excessive guilt to the stammering human race that first came on the scene.'' Scholarship happily combines with intuition in this stimulating analysis of a powerful idea.
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8264-0795-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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