Ultimately doesn’t deliver the substance its subject deserves.
A breezy investigation of the Roman Catholic Church’s approach to demonic possession.
Reporter Wilkinson takes readers to Italy, where a small army of Catholic priests specialize in diagnosing possession and exorcising demons. These priests aren’t preying on helpless people. Their clients, mostly women, are “the picture of normalcy”—professionals, even physicians, who insist that exorcism has saved their lives, and brought about healing that no medical doctor or shrink could. The priest who has done the most to “push exorcism into the mainstream” is Father Gabriele Amorth, who believes that exorcism is a means through which God works miracles. Indeed, in recent years, Italy has experienced something of an exorcism revival. Why has the ritual become so popular? Exorcism appeals to people, the author suggests, because it seems like a time-tested, deeply religious response to the chaos of a society that increasingly rejects morality and traditional religious teaching. The Catholic Church officially sanctions exorcism, but the Church hierarchy is cautious and ambivalent about the trend. The Church requires exorcists to follow strict guidelines—public healing ceremonies that smack of “hysteria” or “sensationalism,” for example, are forbidden. Wilkinson concludes with some speculation about what is really underneath supposed possessions. “Many symptoms and behaviors” of possession “fit the pattern of a litany of known psychological disorders.” Aversion to sacred symbols, which has traditionally been understood as a mark of possession, is also consistent with obsessive-compulsive behavior. Readers may wish Wilkinson had read more scholarship on demon possession—the questions posed by anthropologists of religion and cultural historians could have given this account the gravity and insight it lacks.
Ultimately doesn’t deliver the substance its subject deserves.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2007
ISBN: 0-446-57885-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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