No version of the Bible is the last word, as this text for grammarians, seminarians, and savants demonstrates—simultaneously...
A poet and translator of classical literature tackles the Good Book to find concealed biblical meaning and nuance.
There are peculiarities, Ruden (Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time, 2010, etc.) discovered, with the King’s English versions of the Old and New Testaments, even if that King is James. Of course, other translations of Scripture have faults, too, but when one seeks to understand what they meant when they first entered the canon, King James is the standard for comparison. The author digs into the original classic Hebrew for the Old Testament and “common dialect” Koine Greek for the New. She compares the rhetorical conventions, grammar, style, and poetics of the Hebrew and Greek to the King James. As paired case studies in translation, she presents, among other passages, the story of David and Bathsheba and the Lord’s Prayer, the accounts of Genesis and the Virgin Birth, the Ten Commandments and the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the book of Jonah and Paul’s comments on circumcision. Ruden retranslates these passages primarily for accuracy. “Don’t close this book,” she writes, “and turn on a PBS documentary about ferrets: what I’m about to tell you is way more interesting.” She follows that with a grammar lesson on indicative and subjunctive moods in Hebrew verb forms. Terms for figures of speech abound, and appended at length are translations with transliterations of Hebrew and Greek with their linguistic peculiarities intact; it will surely be unhelpful to acolytes, while experts will ignore the linguistic detours. Ruden finds hidden meaning in the intricate arrangement of the ancient vocabularies, poetics, and lifestyles, and therein lies the fun. The book is often a master class in translation and Bible studies, though casual readers will decide if her “giant crowd” is more felicitous than “great multitude.”
No version of the Bible is the last word, as this text for grammarians, seminarians, and savants demonstrates—simultaneously didactic and entertaining, academic and easygoing.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-90856-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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