A simple and often powerful collection of spiritual and pragmatic advice, despite occasional flaws.
An inspirational handbook about the courage and careful planning required to make the most of a Christian life.
Arkoh and Korley begin their forthright and heavily allusive nonfiction debut on somewhat rocky interpretational ground: they assert that God didn’t create mankind for pleasure; Adam, they say, was created to till the earth. However, in the Book of Genesis, God’s motivation for creating humans is never stated. The authors have a larger point, though, which they reiterate throughout the book: that finding one’s true purpose in life is the primary duty of a faithful Christian, and that God is one’s foremost ally in finding that purpose, if one only aligns one’s will to his: “Stop seeing yourself as others view you,” the authors write, “and begin to see yourself as God sees you.” The book elaborates a step-by-step battle plan for becoming this aspirational figure—by developing a courageous attitude, a prudent approach to life, an attractive personality, a fighting spirit, and so on. The authors present their bracing theme with a strong, plainspoken optimism: “The world is waiting to hear from you,” the authors write in a typical passage. “You have lots to deliver.” Some advice verges on the saccharine or self-evident, though, such as “Continue doing the right things. Do not use your liberty wrongly. Choose and decide on things that will be profitable to you and your dream.” There are also factual errors: Thomas Edison was not knighted, for instance, and Helen Keller was not mute.
A simple and often powerful collection of spiritual and pragmatic advice, despite occasional flaws.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973603-55-9
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
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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