A confused and disappointing ramble through 13th-century papacy.
Ruminations on the career of a most inept and unlikely pope.
In 1294, a deadlocked College of Cardinals suddenly selected an 84-year-old hermit monk, Peter of Morrone, to be pope. Upon taking office as Celestine V, he spent 15 miserable weeks in the custody of the King of Naples before resigning, allegedly the only pope ever to do so. He was imprisoned by his successor, Boniface VIII, who promptly annulled the few actions Celestine had taken. After ten months of confinement Peter died of unknown causes. He was declared a saint in 1313. Unfortunately, the extant well-established facts about Celestine’s tenure appear insufficient to sustain a work of book length. Paraclete Press associate publisher Sweeney (Verily, Verily: The KJV—400 Years of Influence and Beauty, 2011, etc.) provides extensive background information about topics ranging from contemporary poisons to the Sicilian Vespers. He demonstrates his enthusiasm for medieval history, but the information often only has tangential relevance to the life of his subject. Where facts are urgently needed but lacking, the author attempts to compensate with unsatisfying conjecture about such central issues as the true motivation for Celestine’s resignation (he gave a number of reasons) and the cause of his death. Internal contradictions, overstatements and mysteries abound, but the central one concerns Peter’s character. Sweeney declares that Peter proved utterly incompetent as a pope because he did not have “a political bone in his body” and “did not understand how to live and succeed among powerful men on earth,” even though he had traveled extensively, lobbied popes and cardinals and built and administered an array of dozens of monasteries. Was his resignation an act of cowardice, holy wisdom or just weariness? No one really knows. Ultimately, does his story have any ongoing significance? The author labors to argue that Celestine’s resignation and death were a hinge point in the culture of the late Middle Ages, but his contentions are clearly a stretch, and this issue too is left unresolved.
A confused and disappointing ramble through 13th-century papacy.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-53189-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Image/Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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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