The Devil doesn't really get his due in this rushed ``If it's Tuesday, it must be Beelzebub'' biography. While most religions have devils, few have placed as much emphasis on this personification of evil as Christianity. His lineage is mixed, with distant relations as diverse as Egyptian gods, the Canaanite's divinity Baal, and the Greek god Pan (from whom he inherited his looks). Because the early Church focused almost exclusively on the supposedly imminent Second Coming, the Devil played only a secondary role. But with apocalypse a no-show, he was rushed onstage to shore up the faltering beliefs on the faithful. Evil is always a problem in a monotheistic system, and the Devil was a useful scapegoat. Those, like the Gnostics, the Cathars, and the Albigensians, who suggested that the world and everything in it (including, perhaps, the religious establishment) was the work of the Devil, were ruthlessly suppressed. In fact, the Devil has usually been more sinned against than sinning, offered up as the thin pretext for a truly horrific Church-sponsored catalogue of repressions, inquisitions, and other general nastiness, from the extirpation of heretics to religious wars to the witch-hunt mania. As medieval superstition gave way to the Enlightenment, the Devil began to fade as an active instrument of malice, but he acquired a compensating literary reputation as Goethe, Milton, Hugo, and Shaw all gave him star treatment, often casting him as a ``romantic rebel.'' The 20th century has not been kind. Despite several recent comeback attempts, he is now largely washed up, with perhaps only Baudelaire's wisdom for comfort: ``The Devil's deepest wile is to persuade us that he does not exist.'' Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald of London, does a thoroughly adequate job of chronicling his subject's career, but there is just too much material for one slim volume to fully examine the significance of the Devil in all his guises.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-3082-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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