This engaging, fluid memoir from Spong (Liberating the Gospels, 1996, etc.), Episcopalian Bishop of Newark, of his theological odyssey is five parts theoretical, ten parts intramural, and perhaps one part personal and spiritual. Spong’s controversial positions regarding racism, sexism, and homophobia in the Episcopal Church have won him responses from “I believe you are a prophet” to “if all else fails, I will try to rid the world of your evil presence personally.” Spong chose to “move the theological debate out of the structures of sacred space and into the homes and professional lives of our people,” bucking the church hierarchy when he saw it “sacrifice truth and justice to the sensitivities of the majority of those who made up the ecclesiastical body politic.” Questions of moral credibility moved him to defend the rights of African-Americans, women, and homosexuals within his church, and the need to make his church relevant to this day and age prompted a reconsideration of biblical narratives in the light of Einstein and Darwin and the Big Bang. Though Spong is clearly a man of the mind, he has spent much of his time dueling, when not actually duking it out, with a reactionary church hierarchy, calling them on their professed convictions, straightening his words when they have twisted them, taking heat for tinkering with entrenched—and, he feels, outmoded and potentially lethal to his faith—theological concepts that nonetheless have dispensed much religious security over the years. Ultimately, this is a professional memoir, with little personal material—Spong’s wife’s long mental illness is treated here with the same distance he suggests he handled it with at home—and scant spiritual probings. While Spong makes both church politics and his theological cerebrations fascinating, readers may feel dismayed that a man who has so much so say about biblical exegesis consigns the transcendental and the divine to the back seat.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-067538-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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