Don’t roll your eyes. Yes, it’s another contribution to the historical Jesus debate; yes, the whole conversation is getting tired; but Fredrikesen’s contribution is worth making time for. Our carpenter from Nazareth, Fredriksen argues, is not the Jewish Cynic depicted in some of the studies that dot Barnes and Noble shelves, nor is he the —Charismatic Galilean Hasid— of other books. The key to Jesus— life, she insists, is found in his death—a claim that challenges a number of previous books, including Fredriksen’s own From Jesus to Christ (not reviewed). His death, she writes, is —the single most solid fact about Jesus— life.— Since he was publicly crucified, not done in by knife or stone, we know that Jesus did not merely, as some scholars have suggested, instigate an internal Jewish squabble: Purely Jewish matters would never have occasioned a cross, the execution style usually reserved for political troublemakers. However, had Jesus posed a massive political threat to Rome, his followers would have been eliminated as well. The most solid fact we have about his life, then, is also the most puzzling problem: —Why was Jesus crucified?— The crucifixion, Fredriksen suggests, was intended to benefit the audience—the holiday throng in Jerusalem—more than anyone else: crucifixion as crowd control. Fredriksen has made not only the world of first-century Palestine, but also the maze of Jesus scholarship, intelligible to lay readers. She walks us through the complicated world of historical sources with care, explaining the value of Q and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Her discussion of John, which often gets short shrift among scholars fixated on the synoptic Gospels, is especially eloquent. Given the wealth of insights, it’s a shame that Fredrikesen indulges her penchant for make-believe. Her several fictional interludes, which imagine the young Jesus in Jerusalem and the destruction of the city, add nothing to her story—indeed, they distract from an otherwise elegant work.
Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-44675-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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