The book shows some promise, but much of it is largely unnecessary and sensationalist.
A critical look at what many people think is in the Bible.
Hoffman (The Bible’s Cutting Room Floor: The Holy Scriptures Missing from Your Bible, 2014, etc.) offers a mixed bag of thought-provoking insight and banal criticism. He begins by asserting that readers often distort the Bible in five ways: ignorance, historical accident, culture gaps, mistranslation, and misrepresentation. He also notes that all of these distortions share one of two common elements: the misapplication of tradition or missing the original context. Hoffman does well to alert readers to these ways in which the Bible is often misapplied and misunderstood. However, he tends to overextend his argument concerning concepts and statements that “aren’t in the Bible.” The author offers 40 instances in which “the Bible doesn’t say that.” Some of these cause readers to think twice about long-held assumptions. For instance, he spends one chapter examining the lengthy life spans of early Old Testament characters, exposing readers to background that is probably new territory, such as Babylonian mathematics. However, in other cases, he tackles ideas that are outdated or rarely encountered. For instance, he points out that the forbidden fruit of the Garden of Eden was not an apple. Though portrayed as an apple in some early Christian art, it is hard to imagine a modern Christian with even the slightest exposure to Scripture thinking that the forbidden fruit was an apple. Similarly, Hoffman beats the dead horse about “who killed Jesus,” covering well-trodden ground that a select set of Roman officials and Jewish leaders brought about the crucifixion, not “the Jews.” The author also tends to nitpick translations, almost to the point of absurdity. For example, he believes the word “king,” found throughout the Bible, should be read as “ruler,” since ancient kings were different in many ways from modern ones.
The book shows some promise, but much of it is largely unnecessary and sensationalist.Pub Date: Feb. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-05948-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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