A religious treatise thinly disguised as a two-character play that might have been more effective without the fictional...
A dialogue that dramatizes the contest between faith and reason and discusses possibilities for Christian healing.
In the preface to his debut, Chak announces his philosophical design squarely: to explain in rational terms his own decision to become a Christian and, by extension, to show how faith and reason can happily coexist. Instead of a conventional treatise, the author presents a fictional exchange between a therapist and his patient. The patient, Sitara, is anguished over the sudden loss of her young son, who was killed in a car accident. She meets a woman grieving over a miscarriage in a support group and is intrigued by the strength that she finds in her faith, as Sitara has never been particularly religious herself. Once Sitara reveals this to Nathan, her therapist, he immediately launches into a historical account of Jesus’ disciples, followed by discussions about the rational defensibility of faith, the historical reliability of the Bible, the nature of the historical Jesus as both human and divine, and the scientific legitimacy of the Creation story in the book of Genesis. The conversation culminates in an analysis of spiritual redemption and of the nature of the properly lived Christian life. Chak provides an epistemology of faith that’s both philosophically sophisticated and accessible, as in the following passage: “Reason and faith are in a perpetual mental tango. Whenever reason can take a good step forward, faith takes the lead and creates the space for it.” Similarly, he agilely explains why he believes that creationism and science needn’t be understood as mutually contradictory. That said, much of the dialogue comes off as didactic, and the idea of a therapist spending the bulk of a session providing theological lessons may strike some readers as peculiar. As a result, this is an insightful work of Christian apologetics but one that fails as drama.
A religious treatise thinly disguised as a two-character play that might have been more effective without the fictional elementsPub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5127-6937-1
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 2, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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