A short, disjointed work of religious speculation that will appeal mainly to readers who already agree with the authors’...
A short collection of miscellaneous observations about spiritual matters in various religions.
The four authors look over the tenets of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism and use leaps of intuition and conceptual history to examine what they see as the “truths” of those faiths. The bulk of the book’s opening segment discusses Christianity and makes several assertions about Jesus Christ (stylized here as “Y’sa,” or as a new Messiah, “M’sa”) and his role in bringing about the downfall of the Roman Empire: “To defeat the Romans, he [Y’sa] sees that faith in the Roman system needs to be broken,” the authors write. “This faith is based on the fear of crucifixion.” They style Y’sa as a “top-notch physician of the time and place” and imply that his medical knowledge (along with a specially drugged vinegar) allowed him to survive the ordeal of crucifixion, thereby breaking the psychological power of that form of execution for the Romans. But because the authors admit from the outset that “no attempt has been made to provide citations or other scholarly trappings,” these and other observations amount to questionable historical fiction. The book asserts, for example, that the ancients didn’t understand what heartbeats were; that if Y’sa were alive today, he would be a vegan; and, most incredibly, that Muhammad promised gay sex in the afterlife to his martyred followers. The scholarly “trappings” that the authors avoid would flatly contradict these and many other claims in the book, which will leave readers confused about whether to take them as speculative or not. The authors’ calls for an Islam without violence and a Hinduism without excessive mythology are refreshing. However, they don’t compensate for the other ideological imbalances.
A short, disjointed work of religious speculation that will appeal mainly to readers who already agree with the authors’ hypotheses.Pub Date: May 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1511937818
Page Count: 80
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2015
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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