This meticulously documented study of the Christian Coalition illuminates for the general reader the goals and motives of one segment of the religious right. Watson (Religion/Florida State Univ.) finds a mixed message in the public pronouncements of the Christian Coalition leadership. Is their hope to restore to America the Christian character they believe it once had or merely to assure that, among the many movements competing for roles in the nation's public life, the Christian voice is recognized? After a brief opening chapter on the history of evangelicalism that helpfully recalls its 19th-century social activism, its conservative turn in the 1920s, and its public resurgence in the '70s, Watson narrows his focus to the coalition founded in 1989 by Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed. The study, based on the published writings of the two men, is an institutional biography, tracing the life of the coalition from its origins in ideals of a Christian nation through to its successful (and self-compromising) accommodation with political reality. Watson distinguishes the coalition's hope of overcoming the separation between private and public religious life from the aim of kindred religious-right movements legally to establish Christianity as the state religion. Part of the Christian Coalition's overt rejection of statist Christianity is, according to Watson, a cherished self-conception as outsider, even martyr, which serves to enhance its sense of moral purity. Watson shows intriguing parallels between this aspect of the organization's rhetoric and similar language among multiculturalists at the opposite end of the political spectrum. The drama of the movement lies in what Watson takes for an honest and unresolved tension within it between ideals of cultural dominance and of holy martyr. Though repetitive and overly detailed in parts, Watson offers both friend and foe of the Christian Coalition an impartial look at its institutional psychology.
Pub Date: Dec. 29, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17236-2
Page Count: 292
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1997
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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