Sure to be helpful to many readers and just as sure to be controversial.
The whip-smart pastor and author of Accidental Saints: Finding God in All the Wrong People (2015) channels Martin Luther and calls for the church to reform its approach to sex.
Too many of Bolz-Weber’s congregants have been hurt by Christian teachings about sex: couples who marry as virgins only to find they can’t “flip a switch” to suddenly approach “sex as joyful and natural and God-given”; or middle-aged women who can’t bring themselves to wear a V-neck because they are haunted by teachings about modesty they learned as teens. The author, who is now divorced, insists that the church should not be more faithful to abstract principles than to people. “If the teachings of the church are harming the bodies and spirits of people,” she writes, “we should rethink those teachings.” Indeed, a healthy attitude toward sex might be more faithful to the Bible’s teachings anyway. In the Creation story, notes Bolz-Weber, Adam and Eve were told to be fruitful and multiply—“the very first blessing was sex.” Among many other issues, the author, a recovering alcoholic and former comic, addresses pornography, abortion, and debates about transgender bathroom use. Consistent with the title, Bolz-Weber wants readers to feel unashamed about their bodies even as she invites them to grieve the moments in their sexual histories where they have been hurt or caused hurt. She also writes straightforwardly about desire: “I know that when I see my lover, something within me uncoils…a wildness, part velvet, part forest fire.” Not exactly the usual stuff of Christian sex books—and that’s a good thing. Throughout, the author’s voice is inviting, as is the narrative layout: Homiletical reflections on scriptural themes are set in clearly separated boxes, and illustrations—e.g., a risible page from a Christian workbook that details the kinds of cosmetics and speech that increase femininity—make the book an easy, enjoyable read.
Sure to be helpful to many readers and just as sure to be controversial.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60142-758-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Convergent/Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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