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JUDE

Name: JUDE
Author: Liz Trotta
ISBN: 0-06-068274-4

A PILGRIMAGE TO THE SAINT OF LAST RESORT

by Liz Trotta ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1998

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A superficial treatment of the patron saint of hopeless causes. Trotta (Fighting for Air: In the Trenches with Television News, 1991), New York bureau chief of the Washington Times, paints herself as a hard-nosed reporter who, as a lapsed Catholic, is an unusual author for a book on a Catholic saint. But the book shows few of those hard edges; if anything, it’s ahistorical, sentimental, and shallow. Part of this is due to Trotta’s neglect of other studies of Jude. Near the beginning, she claims that —there is virtually no study of him, either in the scholarly or popular sense.— But just because Trotta hasn—t done her homework doesn—t mean that the definitive book on Jude isn—t already out there: It’s the vastly superior Thank You, Saint Jude, by Robert Orsi. Trotta, for example, mentions more than once that middle-age women (like her own mother) are often the most avid proponents of Jude; Orsi spends chapters explaining why 20th-century American women had few other recourses. Trotta tells the memorable stories of Jude’s healings and miracles with a journalist’s sensationalism; Orsi approaches them with a keen ethnographic eye. And while Trotta is the professional writer, Orsi’s book is actually more readable to boot; Trotta’s prose tries too hard with its overblown analogies and imagery (—Jude wafts above the roaring crowd, dodging the spotlight—). Orsi addresses Judean devotion primarily from the Depression through Vatican II, while Trotta’s book explores contemporary Jude veneration in several cities. She does make the good point that Jude devotions seem to have increased since the iconoclastic reforms of Vatican II, as Catholics seek to replace some of the myth and magic of earlier rituals. But since she doesn—t offer any historical basis for comparison with pre—Vatican II devotions, the argument falls short. If you read one book on Jude, let it be Orsi’s. Trotta would do well to read it, too. (Author tour)

Pub Date: July 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-06-068274-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1998

Categories:

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

- BOOK REVIEW
MASTERY
by Robert Greene

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Drake Producing 48 Laws of Power Show

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

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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.