Ecclesiastical reformers and liberal Catholics will find much of value in these pages, which are certain to earn Cornwell...
A thoughtful account arguing that the Catholic Church has condemned itself to irrelevance and even extinction.
Cornwell is no stranger to controversy: his books Hitler’s Pope (1999) and The Hiding Places of God (1991) have been roundly condemned by bishops, cardinals, and conservative Catholic pundits for “journalistic malfeasance” at best and apostasy at worst, and he might count himself fortunate that the Inquisition is, for the moment, inactive. Still, as a former seminarian and doubtful (though not, he hastens to add in a long discussion of his bona fides, agnostic) Catholic, he is well positioned to offer this reasoned, liberal critique of the modern church, whose troubles are many and, he suggests, mostly self-inflicted. One of those troubles is the near-reactionary cult surrounding the present pope, whose “message, invariably, is to accuse the faithful of sinfulness in the conduct of their sexual and marital relationships.” Another is the church’s position on such matters as abortion, priestly celibacy, and the ordination of women, which have served to distance Rome from its non-fanatical constituencies. Still another is the church’s confused attempt to become hip and modern on some fronts; a recent English catechism, Cornwell observes, does not get around to mentioning Jesus until page 21 (and then to state what would seem to be obvious: “for Christians, Jesus is the person who is to be followed”), while liturgy has “become adulterated with admixtures from non-Christian religion and New Age beliefs and practices,” and once-important practices such as confession are all but forgotten. Cornwell’s solutions are as numerous as his criticisms, though sometimes a little less specific; chief among them is his insistence that true “pluralism” is the best remedy for “an exclusive and ever more hierarchical, male-oriented, centralized Church based on fear and mistrust.”
Ecclesiastical reformers and liberal Catholics will find much of value in these pages, which are certain to earn Cornwell still more demerits from the Holy See.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03002-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
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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