Girzone still oraculates his story in parables, but this mode is mushy when he should give real sinew to Francis’s...
Girzone’s fans, who have followed the parablist through his many slim volumes of simplistic restatements of Christ’s messages, as well as his taking on of new subjects such as gay marriage and women in the priesthood, will be delighted to hear that his Jesus figure, Joshua (1990), will arrive in movie theaters next spring just as this new book comes out. Girzone, who retired from the active priesthood in 1981, is on a mission to lift Christ’s parables out of the archaic and bring them to modern man—call it Christ in khakis, perhaps. In The Messenger, he takes on the divisions in the Kingdom of Light (the Catholic Church), the bureaucracies swamping the Vatican, the splinter groups abandoning the Kingdom’s authority, and non-Kingdom preachers springing up with flocks of their own, and so on, all of this making Christ fade from the forefront of faith. This time, Girzone gives up Joshua for Francis, a maverick priest seemingly based on Girzone’s own life and career. Francis flies about the globe making friends and giving long talks about the King (Jesus), whose tender spirit has been wounded by the many cracks splitting his Kingdom.
Girzone still oraculates his story in parables, but this mode is mushy when he should give real sinew to Francis’s antagonist.Pub Date: April 16, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-49514-5
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2002
With healthy skepticism and heavy-handed irony, Washington chronicles the tortuous history of the Theosophic movement. Madame Blavatsky differed from other late 19th century mediums in that, while she used parlor tricks as demonstrations of her mystical abilities, she also created a fecund pseudo-philosophy, drawing partially on Eastern religions, in a book, The Secret Doctrine. Her thick and inconsistent tomes were required reading for the Theosophical Society, which she and a partner formed in America and which, while never large, has had an incongruously pervasive influence. Washington (Literary Theory and the End of English, not reviewed) provides a perceptive intellectual background of 18th- and 19th-century occultism. The Society became a modest success but attracted more than its share of bizarre con men and converts, like the mystic flaneur G.I. Gurdjieff and the utopian Rudolf Steiner. Despite its subtitle, however, this history is mainly concerned with European Theosophy and its sects as the nexus of ``western gurus,'' even though the US was generally more receptive to Asian religious philosophy and charlatan gurus. Although the Society's leaders get full billing, and their numerous sectarian branches and infighting are chronicled, the great figures who were attracted to Theosophy—W.B. Yeats, G.B. Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, and others—are treated peripherally, with little insight into either their drives or what it was about the Secret Doctrine that appealed to them. The exception is a chapter on the wartime exiles in Hollywood, such as Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood, and the US career of Krishnamurti, an Indian of obscure origins whom the Theosophists adopted (and manipulated) as the messianic ``World Teacher.'' A plain history that doesn't take up the social and intellectual issues that drew so many to Theosophy and continue to draw people to its descendant—the New Age movement. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8052-4125-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
A timely history of the American politicians and publicists who have appealed to ``the people.'' Kazin (History/American Univ.; Barons of Labor, not reviewed) shows how populist language has a complicated history, full of irony, paradox, and at times menace. As an academic historian, Kazin shares the disquiet that many of his colleagues have felt in defining populism. On the one hand, there is sympathy for the liberal and inclusive attack on corporate interests and closed government that characterized the great People's Party of the 1890s, the most sustained attack on the two-party system since the Civil War. On the other hand, Kazin recognizes that populist rhetoric, whether liberal or conservative, has often constructed ``the people'' as a group of white males, leaving out women, new immigrants, and African-Americans. Furthermore, there has been a tendency for populists of both the right and the left to engage in conspiracy theories that victimize vulnerable minorities. After setting out the broad emergence of a populist style based on a 19th-century reading of Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln, Kazin shows how this subtle and flexible language was appropriated by one political movement after another: the People's Party, the Anti- Saloon League, the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Communist Party, and Father Coughlin. Finally, he chronicles the capture of populist language by conservatives, whether Cold Warriors and segregationists like George Wallace, or the Republican right of Goldwater and, later, Reagan and his would-be heirs. Kazin laments the elitism of postNew Deal liberalism, which opened the way, he believes, for a conservative appropriation of populist argument. A solid historical view, slightly deflated by Kazin's muddled speculation on the need for new, inclusive social movements that incorporate the historic language of populism.
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-465-03793-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1994
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