A Christian video game enthusiast argues that comic strips, animated films and video games should be used to spread the Gospel.
Isinga opens by explaining three important terms: “Comic Strip,” “Animated Films” and “Video Game.” Any reader who can’t recall what the initials mean will be confused, since Isinga uses them often. “The CS, AF and VG are intimately linked,” he writes, noting that a work produced in one format often is produced in one or two others as well. As examples, he points to the Mickey Mouse, Lion King and Tarzan comics, animated films and video games from Walt Disney, a company he calls a “subject matter expert since most of its successful products follow this circuit.” He refers to this CS-AF-VG team of products as “TriCom, or Trio of Communication.” If readers look past the alphabet soup of initials, Isinga simply believes that these visual media have great potential as tools for evangelism. Isinga includes artwork from many comics, animated films and video games, and curiously, he includes images from what he criticizes as the “pornographic” animated film “Boobalicious.” These images won’t sit well with some. Isinga’s heart is in the right place, but unfortunately, his grammar skills are not: Acknowledging that some video games are violent and considered dangerous, he writes, “As for me I think we should not attack the VG in general, but that they need to be studied case by case like we do with movies, that we cannot throw everything in the waste basket.” He is at his most persuasive when noting that angels and demons are featured in comics, animated films and video games “but not from a biblical standpoint, and one wonders when the lovers of the Gospel will sufficiently speak in this field.” It would be helpful if Isinga included his thoughts about how Christian artists can be encouraged to produce such work.
Awkwardly written, but a worthy topic.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492749936
Page Count: 88
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2014
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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