Vivid travelogue combines with a polemic that Christianity was originally a Gnostic offshoot of Zoroastrianism in this intriguing, but highly partisan, attempt to discover the significance of the mysterious Wise Men. Fascinated by Marco Polo's statement that he saw the tombs of the Magi in the Persian city of Sava, screenwriter and journalist Roberts (A River in the Desert, not reviewed, etc.) traces their footsteps in an adventure that begins in Khamenei's Tehran and ends, after several twists and turns, in Bethlehem. Accompanied by Reza, his scatologically loquacious Iranian guide, our author's first surprise is to discover in Sava ruins that actually correspond with Polo's wondrous description. Roberts balances the narrative of his journey to Bethlehem with uncensored accounts of Reza's vulgarities—he learned English on an American campus in the '60s. En route, Roberts also takes gratuitous swipes at Jesus Christ, the New Testament, and ``the Church of Rome,'' declaring that the Magi at Christ's birth were Zoroastrians and that Roman orthodoxy, based on Paul's replacing gnosis with faith, headed a conspiracy that obliterated all record of gnostic Christianity until the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls. Our author hears of links between Christianity and Zoroastrianism in his encounters in the Islamic holy city of Qom, among Zoroastrians at Yazd, and in Iraq, where he discovers some Mandaeans, a Gnostic sect that he believes was the missing link between Zoroastrianism and true Christianity. We hear of their worship of (a pardoned) Satan and of how Jesus escaped crucifixion to spend his subsequent life with the Magi. Roberts produces no real evidence for his thesis, and even when he speaks of the Dead Sea scrolls, he is offering us simply his interpretation, with very few references, of highly esoteric material. Frequently hilarious, Roberts, as he himself admits, is presenting a history that fits his own needs.
Pub Date: Dec. 5, 1995
ISBN: 1-57322-012-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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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