An accomplishment for the academy. Readers seeking a less theoretical approach would do well to try Jon Entine’s Abraham’s...
Where did the Jews come from, and what does that question really mean?
Weitzman (Hebrew and Semitic Languages, Judaic Studies/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Solomon: The Lure of Wisdom, 2011, etc.) explores the question of Jewish origins in almost tortuous detail, demonstrating that what seems like a basic inquiry is in fact a tangle of theories, approaches, and prejudices. The author explains that three viewpoints prevail in the search for Jewish origins. The first is that simple “sleuthing” will lead to a single, obvious answer to the question, “where do Jews come from?” The second is constructivism, a view that origins must be seen as a story or narrative. The third is a postmodern view that is critical of the very search for origins at all. Weitzman begins with genealogy, which may seem an obvious tool but which the author soon discounts. From there, he explores linguistic and source document theories for the origin of Jews from Near Eastern ancestors. Alternatively, he looks at theories that emphasize the origin of Jews as a people distinct from the biblical Israelites. Weitzman goes on to explore ideas of Jewish origins as espoused by Darwinists and by Freud, the archaeological evidence for Jewish origins, and ideas on Hellenism’s effect on Jewish identity. Finally, he examines the role of DNA testing in understanding ethnic origins, a practice filled with promises and pitfalls. In the end, readers may be disappointed by Weitzman’s anticlimactic (though perhaps inevitable) conclusion: “The history of the Jews has to start somewhere, but it is not clear whether, after many centuries of trying and failing to establish that starting point, scholarship has developed or will ever develop the ability to do so.” The author is comprehensive, erudite, and honest, but the book is too academic and theoretical to assist general readers with questions about what it means to be Jewish.
An accomplishment for the academy. Readers seeking a less theoretical approach would do well to try Jon Entine’s Abraham’s Children (2007).Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-691-17460-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 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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