An in-depth look at a little-known American religious radical. Kenny (The Passion of Ansel Bourne, not reviewed) limns the life and legacy of Elias Smith (1769-1846), a Christian reformer in whom the author became interested while researching a volume on early cases of multiple personality disorder. (The polarities between personalities, he found, often have a religious element.) Smith was the leader of a loose network of reformist radicals who called themselves simply ``Christians.'' While serving as the pastor of an orthodox Baptist Church in Woburn, Mass., Smith became enamored of radical Jeffersonianism and determined to apply its democratic principles to Christianity. In the wake of the French Revolution (itself inspired by America's example), he called for a church free of authoritarian hierarchies and unshackled from centuries of ossified tradition. The Bible, still a principal source of authority for Smith, would be interpreted by ordinary laypeople for themselves without mediation by clergy. Smith's brand of Christianity was strongly premillenarian—looking toward the Second Coming of Christ, which would usher in 1,000 years of the Kingdom of God. In this, the United States had a special messianic role to fulfill; it was called by Providence to be an example to the world in helping to hasten the day. Through his newspaper, The Herald of Gospel Liberty (the first religious newspaper in the US), the New England divine became one of the most important religious figures of his day. Kenny considers Smith as an example of the radical reconstruction of self through religious rebirth, and of the tensions in early America between concepts of individual liberty and the needs of society. Kenny provides a well-researched and readable biography of a man who helped democratize religion and in the process created a truly American Christianity.
Pub Date: May 17, 1994
ISBN: 1-56098-321-3
Page Count: 392
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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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