A homosexual cabal. A drugged pope. Conspiratorial cardinals. Evil Swiss Germans. Murder.
Thus the ingredients of this innuendo-rich true-crime tale, set among the gilded halls of Saint Peter’s. On May 4, 1998, a Swiss Guard lance corporal named Cedric Tornay stormed into the Vatican City apartment of his commandant, Colonel Alois Estermann, shot Estermann and his wife dead, and then killed himself. In a note to his mother shortly beforehand, Tornay wrote, “I must do this service for all the guards remaining as well as to the Catholic church. I have sworn to give my life for the pope and this is what I am doing.” Vatican officials quickly covered up the murder, saying little other than that Tornay had had a cyst on the brain and that traces of cannabis had been found in his bloodstream. The heavy in this cover-up—for so London Sunday Times correspondent Follain (Jackal, 1998, etc.) considers it to be—was wily Vatican press secretary Joaquin Navarro-Valls, by his lights a worthy descendant of Torquemada and Richelieu. But Novarro-Valls was not alone: after all, Follain suggests, Pope John Paul II knew of the murder-suicide but did nothing to determine why the young, decorated guard had killed the man who only that afternoon had been promoted to commander of the Swiss Guard. And no wonder: according to one of Follain’s informants, “The Holy Father is so ill he’s become a prisoner of the Curia,” a religious Mafia if ever there were one—or so we’re to believe. Follain argues that Tornay and Estermann had had an affair, that Tornay had complained loudly and frequently of the laxness of security and the ridiculousness of rules that prevented the Swiss Guard from carrying guns while dressed in their striped-pantaloon finery, and that in all events a heavy animosity between the French and German Swiss who make up the security unit keeps all involved from doing their jobs effectively. All understandable motives for murder, one supposes, but not necessarily strong evidence for malfeasance and conspiracy at the highest levels of the Church.
That scenario will be of interest to those convinced that the Illuminati run the world. Others may want to wait for the movie.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2003
ISBN: 0-06-620954-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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