In his excellent A Thief in the Night (1989), Cornwell looked into rumors that Pope John Paul I had been murdered. Here, the former seminarian conducts a yet more subtle and meaningful investigation—of the ``incidence and significance...of paranormal religious phenomena'': flying monks, weeping statues, divine apparitions, and the like. A professed agnostic, Cornwell a few years ago found his nonbelief undermined when he experienced a prophetic ``religious dream.'' His curiosity aroused, he set off on a worldwide hunt for earthly signs of a divine hand, beginning with a visit to the Yugoslavian town of Medjugorje, where, for years, three children have allegedly been conversing daily with the Virgin Mary. Although repulsed by the commercialization of the phenomenon—with souvenir- vendors and millions of tourists creating a ``spiritual Disneyland''—Cornwell found the sight of the children ``speaking silently'' to the invisible Virgin ``truly astonishing,'' with one girl's eyes seeming ``to shine with an unearthly light.'' But what to make of this? And of his subsequent experiences, including witnessing the stigmata of a Montreal recluse, the liquefaction of the dried blood of St Januarius in Naples, and the devotion inspired by the alleged miracles of Padre Pio (healing, stigmata, bilocation)—and, on the dark side, the terror of a man supposedly possessed by evil incarnate? As a journalist, Cornwell's trained skepticism compels him to dig out mundane, generally psychological, explanations for nearly all; and yet he finds himself profoundly moved by the ``symbolic'' power of these ``miracles,'' declaring- -especially after soul-stirring meetings with Briege McKenna, a nun with an apparent gift of healing—that the importance of ``prodigies'' lies not in whether they offer ``supernatural `evidence,' '' but how potent they are as living ``symbols'' of the ``religious imagination.'' An affecting personal spiritual memoir as well as a tantalizing tour through the miraculous, which reveals its mystery- -if not its secret—under Cornwell's fresh and compassionate gaze.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1991
ISBN: 0-446-51468-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1991
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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