by Paul Hofmann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 2002
Highlights an interesting aspect of the world’s smallest sovereign entity.
Former New York Times Rome bureau chief Hofmann (Umbria, 1999, etc.) portrays influential women in the papacy’s history, culture, and work force.
About one-tenth of current Vatican employees are female, and the author speaks with more than 40 of them, including nuns, housekeepers, lawyers, and art curators. But before delving into contemporary life, Hofmann details the history of women in church legend. Among those featured are “Popess Joan,” a ninth-century German who, disguised as a man, so impressed the papal city with her learning that she was made a cardinal and eventually elected pope, until an untimely pregnancy revealed her true gender; and Saint Catherine of Siena (1347–80), who convinced Pope Gregory XI to move the government of the church back to Rome. The present-day church, many women feel, has a strong antifemale bias and a “purple ceiling” beyond which they can’t advance. “The great number of sainted virgins and matrons, as well as female martyrs, attests to the conspicuous role of pious women in early Christianity,” the author notes. “Yet Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians that ‘women must keep silent in the church.’ ” Judging from the profiles here, Paul’s admonition is still in force. Even though Sister Johanna is a highly qualified nurse, she works as housekeeper to an elderly cardinal who requested her services (without consulting Johanna herself) for six months, a “temporary” position that has lasted more than four years. A translator of papal addresses and other documents who declines to give her name expected to be promoted after her superior retired—after all, she had 12 years experience in the department, was multilingual, and cheerfully worked overtime. Instead, the position was given to a man with limited Italian-language skills. The future seems to hold more promise; some Vatican insiders predict that the continuing scarcity of priests will lead to women’s admittance to the priesthood, as well as forcing the church to drop the rule of clerical celibacy.
Highlights an interesting aspect of the world’s smallest sovereign entity.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-27490-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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