An exciting, thought-provoking new reading of a famously complex biblical text.
A revelatory new examination of the book of Ezekiel.
In this rather stunning debut of biblical scholarship, Kevas and Walker take up the famously problematic book of Ezekiel and rigorously examine it using several energetic new methods. Their book is essentially a heavily annotated, ground-clearing new translation of Ezekiel in which the authors painstakingly lay out their exegetical methods. They assert that the notorious difficulty of the text, which most readers are familiar with via the King James translation, is mostly the result of mistranslation and linguistic inaccuracy. To correct these factors, they attempt to pinpoint the exact meaning of each word in the text as it’s found in such ancient versions as the Dead Sea Scrolls (in their translation, virtually every word is underscored and given a reference number, aka a concordance number, to verify the translation from Hebrew or Greek). Kevas and Walker do this for the sake of transparency, and they buttress their translation with exhaustive annotation that draws on a formidable range of documentary material—not only the available Jewish sources, but also such material as the Quran and the Sibylline Oracles. Their goals are twofold: first, to demonstrate that Ezekiel has been drastically mistranslated over the centuries; and second, that as a result, Ezekiel has been fundamentally misunderstood for the last 2,600 years. In the course of their new translation, Kevas and Walker claim to have uncovered not only new nuances in the text, but something far more ambitious: an entire shadow-book hidden in plain sight, a series of detailed prophecies that predict such things as airplanes, modern technology and developments in Middle Eastern history as well as a carefully imagined set of predictions involving Jesus Christ returning to Earth as the Messiah in our own times. “It seemed apparent to us,” they write, “that God would have wanted the generation that these prophecies describe to understand the warnings.” Readers may balk at the book’s conclusions about those hidden prophecies, but along the way, they’ll be thrilled by the thinking on display.
An exciting, thought-provoking new reading of a famously complex biblical text.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1483949710
Page Count: 254
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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