A fine, useful resource for lay scholars, clergy and serious Bible readers.
A fresh translation of six historical books of the Hebrew Bible.
Venerable scholar Alter (Hebrew and Comparative Literature/Univ. of California; The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes: A Translation with Commentary, 2010, etc.) continues a decade of biblical-translation work with this new look at Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. These core historical texts explain the history of ancient Israel, including such famous figures as Samson, Elijah, David and Solomon. Each translation is accompanied by an introductory essay and extensive commentary in footnotes. Though Alter does not address the obvious question—why another translation?—his translation is unique enough and his commentary extensive and erudite enough to render the question rather moot. The author has a definitive respect for the ancient writers who first wrote these texts; he sees them not as “schools” or abstract conveyors of legend but as real people who knew they were doing an important service by recording this history, as best they knew it. Alter also reads the texts with a sharp eye for moral lessons and ethical dilemmas. Rather than ignoring ethical issues or chalking them up to cultural differences, he grapples with them, understanding the text to be an ethical and religious work. Yet he does so without snobbishness. Alter’s translation has an earthy quality, sticking closely to the text without bending it to fit modern preferences for grammar and language flow.
A fine, useful resource for lay scholars, clergy and serious Bible readers.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-393-08269-2
Page Count: 928
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2013
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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