A disturbing indictment of the methods and ethos of Opus Dei, from a devout Catholic who spent 18 years in the organization and worked at its highest levels. Opus Dei, a worldwide Roman Catholic society for professional lay men and women, founded in Franco's Spain by Fr. JosÇ Mar°a Escriv† de Balaguer (who died in 1994), now boasts over 70,000 members and has the high regard of Pope John Paul II. Controversy has surrounded ``The Work'' (Opus Dei means ``the work of God'') from its earliest days. Its penchant for secrecy and repeated allegations of cultlike manipulation have led many priests and bishops to be wary of the organization. Tapia's account will do much to increase these misgivings. She tells how in 1948, when working at the prestigious Council for Scientific Research in Madrid, she was persuaded to separate from her family, break off her engagement to her fiancÇ, and enter Opus Dei's inner circle of celibate ``numeraries.'' For five years, she worked closely with Escriv† in Rome and then spent almost ten years as head of the Women's Section in Venezuela. She fell from favor for questioning some of Escriv†'s directives and adopting a more open attitude. In a suspenseful final section she describes being called back to Rome, where she was held incommunicado and forced to endure attempts to break her of her ``bad spirit.'' After her final expulsion, Opus Dei tried to obliterate any evidence of her presence in the organization. Tapia describes members' uncritical adulation of the autocratic Escriv†, the fierce psychological pressure to recruit new members, and the complex system of informers within the organization. She also notes the toll these elements take on members, including nervous breakdowns and suicides. Her account is all the more compelling in view of Opus Dei's current attempts to force Escriv†'s canonization. Avoiding facile sensationalism, Tapia's relentlessly detailed chronicle shows how idealism can lead to the repression of basic human rights.
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8264-0937-7
Page Count: 388
Publisher: Continuum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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