Almost always absorbing and thought-provoking.
What is a miracle? And who gets to decide? Here's a look inside the process.
Sullivan's background is in true-crime reporting (Labyrinth, 2002, etc.), but when he learned of an apparition of the Virgin Mary in a Washington State trailer park, he felt compelled to investigate. Thus began a long trip that led him inevitably to the Vatican, then to Bosnia-Herzegovina, where, since 1981, the Virgin has regularly appeared to six inhabitants of the little town of Medjugorje. Sullivan describes the events surrounding the initial apparition: six Croatian children—the oldest a girl of 16—saw a shining young woman on a hill outside the town: the Virgin Mary. Word of the apparition spread rapidly, and the visionaries were soon relaying Mary's messages of love, peace, and understanding to all who would listen. In spite of oppression by the communist government of then-Yugoslavia, and harsh skepticism by the local bishop, the visions became a sensation in the Catholic world. Visiting a dozen years later, Sullivan found the country in the throes of a brutal civil war, yet Medjugorje remained a magnet for pilgrims from all corners of the world. Others came to play their parts, whether to marvel at the miracle, investigate it, or extract money from the thousands of visitors. Sullivan himself experienced a sort of vision, which he reports candidly. He examines the Medjugorge apparition from all angles, comparing it to Lourdes, Fatima, and other miraculous visions of recent times, including one in Arizona that church authorities finally rejected. The author concludes with a visit to Father Groeschel, a New York–based scholar of the miraculous whose comments put Medjugorge into context. In the end, it is clear that something powerful has happened; exactly what it is, or why it has happened, remain mysteries.
Almost always absorbing and thought-provoking.Pub Date: April 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-87113-916-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2004
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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