A welcome addition to the vast library on American religious discord.
Thoughtful study of the great schism between religious conservatives and progressives about women’s control over their own bodies.
It may be hard to believe, but there was a time when many evangelical Christians were not against—and some even actively supported—abortion and its legalization. Indeed, writes Griffith (Director, Danforth Center on Religion and Politics/Washington Univ.; American Religions: A Documentary History, 2007, etc.), in 1969, a survey of Texas Baptists revealed that 90 percent “felt their state’s abortion law should be loosened.” What happened in the intervening years? By the author’s account, the story stretches back a century and more, to the time of Margaret Sanger on one side and Anthony Comstock on the other and their war over the issue of contraception. Through Comstock’s agitation, the federal government had made it illegal, as long ago as 1873, to even possess a pamphlet advocating contraception. Sanger’s militant working-class Catholicism, lashed with socialism and other progressive causes, would have made her a public enemy in her time in any event, but interestingly, as Griffith notes, she was strategically crafty in recruiting Protestant clergy to what boiled down to a fairly simple thesis: laws governing the “morality” of women should be “crafted by women themselves.” Though academically rigorous, Griffith’s account is both accessible and eye-opening: it simply astonishes that Christian organizations were instrumental in “family life”—meaning sex—education. But that’s one flavor of Christianity, of course; the other is a rigorously fundamentalist one, and the two eventually pitched “a battle over the moral framework in which sexual knowledge would be embedded and over who had the right to determine just what those frameworks would be.” As with every other battle in every other arena in which conservatives and progressives face off, the heat rose with the rise of Donald Trump; Griffith hopes that one day the rancor will finally “rouse a fractured nation to build a bearable peace.”
A welcome addition to the vast library on American religious discord.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-09475-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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