An engaging walking tour of the world’s most powerful beliefs and what they share.
A wide-ranging tale examines the long spiritual history of humanity.
Benedicta, the beautiful, aristocratic mother of Francis, the young seeker in Livingston’s debut book, lies on her deathbed when she bequeaths to her son a collection of old scrolls. Each one is a journal recording a different part of Benedicta’s life—and the diverse people, representing various religious and spiritual practices, she met along the way. The journals tell the story of her trips—they’re full of travelogue-style details—and of the unplanned insights she gained in the far-flung places she visited, learning about the religions of each place from the people she met there. A teacher in Jerusalem named Abraham Joshua Hirsch tells her about Judaism; a Franciscan monk named Giuseppe talks about Christianity; a young businessman named Ravi Kumar explains Hinduism (and she discovers a great deal about India’s other religions from a knowledgeable chauffeur in New Delhi named Sita Rom); an Australian Aboriginal elder named Freddy instructs her in the ancient spiritual ways of his people; in Cairo she learns about Islam from the story of Ali Mohammed al-Mirsi. In each case, Livingston subordinates the personal to the informational; the characters throughout are mostly mouthpieces for researched facts, although the author presents that material so smoothly that readers will likely be caught up just the same. The many differences in all the systems of belief Benedicta encounters are laid out clearly, and the curiosity of the character herself tends to tease out the commonalities Livingston clearly wants to highlight. “There is only one type of Spirituality in the world,” readers are told. “It provides an inner ear for the inner voice we all have.” The book draws a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality, stressing that the former causes hatred and fear, while the latter encourages peace and love. The nature of these observations tends to be obscured rather than enhanced by the thin fictional narrative that overlays them, but the reflections themselves should be appealing to any student of comparative religion.
An engaging walking tour of the world’s most powerful beliefs and what they share.Pub Date: July 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-8409-9
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2019
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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