O’Shea’s thorough research and effortless writing exposes the political and economic side of the inquisition and its...
A Franciscan Brother stands up to the inquisition in Southern France, and the inquisition backs down!
The Dominicans, “the hounds of the Lord,” were the leaders in the conflict between Catholic Orthodoxy and the Cathars. O’Shea’s third book on the subject (Sea of Faith: Islam and Christianity in the Medieval Mediterranean World, 2007) reinforces his reputation as an expert on medieval France and shows how much he has expanded his knowledge of the Cathars’ philosophy and practices. The Albigensian “heretics” came to life in reaction to the technocratic institutionalism of the church. They sought heaven through a life of poverty and new, vernacular interpretations of scriptures, rejecting the wealth and spiritual remoteness of the Catholic Church. Looking upon the church as the enemy, they denied all the sacraments and the cross as anything but an instrument of Roman torture. After the Albigensian Crusade failed to eliminate the Cathars, the Dominicans used the inquisition to complete their total annihilation. From their beginnings in the early 13th century, the inquisitors accused, tried and convicted those denounced as heretics. Once condemned, all lands and possessions were confiscated and their families were left in penury. Those not executed were confined in “the wall,” a prison in Carcassonne where they were tortured and starved to the end of their lives. This prison was the tipping point for Brother Bernard Délicieux, who used his great rhetorical gifts to convince the king’s magistrate to secure a personal audience for him with Philip the Fair. Délicieux’s formidable powers of persuasion convinced the king to take steps against the Dominican abuse, but he did not free the prisoners of the wall. Délicieux enjoyed support from the king, his magistrates and certainly from the Franciscan Order as he continued his fight to eliminate the inquisition—but the deviant inquisitors. His status was so great that his Order appealed to him to calm rising tempers in Carcassonne.
O’Shea’s thorough research and effortless writing exposes the political and economic side of the inquisition and its irreversible damage to the Catholic Church.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1994-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
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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