In this often moving and unsettling book, Claiborne provides a meaningful contribution to a deeply fraught topic.
Passionate Christian activist Claiborne (The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical, 2006, etc.) uses Scripture and societal statistics in an argument for the abolishment of the death penalty.
The author begins by considering the victims of crime involved in death sentence cases. He notes that the death penalty is rarely satisfying to those left in the wake of tragic crimes; instead, it prolongs mental anguish for victims’ families and places the emphasis on the criminal as opposed to the victim. After addressing the needs of victims, Claiborne explores faith issues surrounding the death penalty, arguing that the early Christian church was strictly against its use. The author points to the death of Jesus—“the most famous execution in history”—and notes the irony that his followers would ever support the executions of others. Turning to modern times, Claiborne acknowledges that the death penalty has been dwindling in use worldwide, and in the United States, for decades. He also points out that the U.S. ranks alongside such nations as Saudi Arabia and Iraq in its use of the death penalty, while most nations have banned it or diminished its use. Claiborne finds a tie between the modern use of execution and the history of illegal lynchings in the American South, arguing that the death penalty today continues to be a racially charged issue. After discussing botched executions, the innocent on death row, and the weight of the issue upon executioners themselves, the author offers an alternative viewpoint on how to bring about justice in such cases. Claiborne’s arguments are well-structured and, perhaps necessarily, laced with pleas to emotion. Proponents of the death penalty (among others) may be put off by his localization of the issue as a problem inherent to the Southern states, specifically to Southern evangelicals.
In this often moving and unsettling book, Claiborne provides a meaningful contribution to a deeply fraught topic.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234737-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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