Next book

THREE GOSPELS

Price, a prolific man of letters (A Whole New Life, 1994; The Promise of Rest, 1995, etc.), offers us a fine new translation of the Gospels according to Mark and John, and Price's own account of the life of Jesus, along with four lengthy introductory essays in which he explains his purpose and method. Forget that you ever read a Gospel or heard of Jesus. Read the texts afresh, in a new and relatively literal translation, and listen. This, Price explains, rather than yet another liturgical or ``official'' version, is his hope for his readers. He tells us that his starting point is literary: he sees the Gospels as stories that have exerted an unequaled pull on human minds. His translations are deliberately conservative, in that they stick closely to the original Greek and avoid paraphrase. The Word in John's Prologue ``became flesh and tented among us''; to sin is to ``go wrong''; to have faith is ``to trust.'' Price's English has a rugged, plain quality, lacking either archaism or an affected use of modern idiom, except for contractions: e.g. ``So they're no longer two but one. Thus what God yoked man must not divide.'' Price heightens the stark quality of his prose by a very sparing use of punctuation, arguing that the ancient manuscripts have none at all, although he is clearly motivated by his belief that minimal punctuation makes for a ``clean'' style and elicits attentive reading. His attempt to compose a Gospel of his own is a harmony of the canonical four with additions from unorthodox apocryphal sources. In the essays preceding each section, Price tells us a little about what the Gospels mean to him and how he approaches them. He displays a good working knowledge of Greek and a grasp of the complexities of current New Testament scholarship, much of which, in his capacity as a seasoned critic, he finds absurdly agnostic. Both linguistically and spiritually stimulating. (Author tour)

Pub Date: May 1, 1996

ISBN: 0-684-80336-4

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Scribner

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996

Next book

THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

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

Next book

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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

Close Quickview