In line with such cultivated, if sometimes fusty Christian apologists as C.S. Lewis, NBCC Award—winning novelist Price (for Kate Vaiden, 1986, etc.) calls on reason and experience to substantiate belief in a providential God, even in the face of great suffering. A Whole New Life (1994)was Price’s account of his faith-inspiring recovery from spinal cancer. A young medical student, also suffering from cancer, read the book and wrote Price asking for spiritual insight into his own pointlessly worsening state. This short book expands a letter Price composed in response and read in the fall of 1997 before an audience at Auburn Seminary in New York. Price never sent the letter to its first intended reader, who withdrew from communicating and, soon after, died. But the common public, who have now become the addressee of these words, should not scruple not to read them for fear of intruding on a private intimacy of two. The address to the young man is more an occasion for Price to attempt reconciling two distinct voices within himself: on the one hand, a professorial deist in the mold of the 18th-century Enlightenment, who believes with “the vast majority of the human race” and with “most religions”—as a religiously inclined philosophe would indeed put it—that God exists principally as mind and that the soul is immortal; and, on the other, a devout pietist who envisions Jesus Christ washing away all wounds. In the end, Price doesn—t so much fashion a unified theodicy out of these two perspectives as situate them at opposing ends of theological spectrum on which readers are invited to find their place—a helpful, if unoriginal, service. Though devoted readers of the prolific Price will savor this reflection, especially as a follow-up to A Whole New Life, the author’s modest demurral at the start of the book, that “few of its ideas would seem new to a well-read adult” is doubtless true.
Pub Date: April 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-85626-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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