A physically attractive if idiosyncratic presentation, likely of interest to readers not immediately scared off by effusions...
The Gospel of Mark, as run through a New Age blender and puréed into an ecumenical smoothie.
Artist-designer Rimm offers her own version of the parable of the sower: that of the scuba diver, who drifts through murky waters, beacon (but no spear gun) in hand. The scuba diver could be you, who “may have probed the waters of religion before but walked away with an aching thirst.” For Rimm, “miraculously, I found God when I jumped from the boat of Unbelief.” In this rendering of St. Mark, surrounded by bits of wisdom from other times and traditions and by the author’s overflowing, enthusiastic commentary, Jesus–that is, the Cosmic Christ, who is evidently an aspect of Cosmic Creative Energy–comes off as a rather chatty fellow who, we suspect, makes finger quotes when he talks: “Whoever among you who wants to be ‘number one’ must be everybody’s slave.” Occasionally, he sounds like the current president: “Whoever is not against us is on our side.” Rarely does he show any of the elegance of the old King James Christ, but his expressions are more elegant than talk of “the undigitized self” in “the Christ Zone”–or of the Passion as a metaphor for curbing fear in the name of Cosmic Awareness, and so forth, even if such formulations are advanced with relentless good cheer and with a big-tent willingness to entertain other ideas.
A physically attractive if idiosyncratic presentation, likely of interest to readers not immediately scared off by effusions such as, “the God of the Cosmos, who is an infinite Sea of Love, who can transform us into higher spiritual beings.”Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9745750-6-3
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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