A personal, highly charged—perhaps too much—investigation of the prophecies and policies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.
A former Jehovah’s Witness speaks out about the religion.
Author Staelens, in his debut nonfiction book, writes from a personal perspective as a former longtime member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. He’s interested in the history of the organization, its prophecies and its practices, in which he sees coverups, deception, manipulation and an abuse of power. In essence, Staelens depicts Jehovah’s Witnesses as less of a church group than a cult, requiring complete adherence to doctrine among its members and denying the questioning of its tenets. In looking into the group’s past, he uncovers instances of foundational stories that have been retroactively glossed over and avoided. He relates tales about members of the hierarchy damaging families through abuse of the group practices of “disfellowshipping” and shunning members who fall out of favor with leaders. The author, who’s also a former private and commercial pilot, borrows lessons and metaphors from his profession that he believes could be applied to his former religious group. In particular, he outlines how the airline procedure of “crew resource management”—which focuses on interpersonal communication, leadership and decision-making improvements—could help avoid human error. The concept, first started by NASA, has spread to other industries, and the author argues that it could also be usefully applied to religious hierarchies in order to eschew autocratic decision-making and lopsided judgments. Staelens’ writing style is direct though colloquial, often asking rhetorical questions of the reader and frequently resorting to invective and hyperbole, such as comparisons of church propaganda to Nazi propaganda. He appears to be writing primarily for members of the religion to convince them to rely on their own reasoning and judgment and to beware of the group’s teachings. He has potential for a readership within the context of disaffected members, though he would be better served to tone down the volume of his writing and take a more analytical approach in order to sway a larger audience with reason and scholarship.
A personal, highly charged—perhaps too much—investigation of the prophecies and policies of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.Pub Date: July 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482647808
Page Count: 354
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2013
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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