C.S. Lewis might not approve of the language, but he’d surely approve of the sentiment. A thought-provoking entertainment.
A highly personal—and unconventional—defense of belief in Christian doctrine.
Well, not defense of doctrine, exactly, but defense (the root meaning of apologia) of Christian emotions and their “grown-up dignity.” Besides, writes Spufford (Red Plenty, 2012, etc.), going on to the second meaning of the term, “I’m not sorry,” even though as an Englishman writing about religion, “I’m fucking embarrassed.” Spufford’s language isn’t exactly Aquinian or Augustinian, but it gets to the point—to several points, in fact. One, bouncing off the trope of the messages emblazoned on buses in Britain to the effect that since there probably isn’t a God, we should all just try to be happy on our own, gets Spufford’s dander up sufficiently to mount a crusade fought in naughty words: “New Atheists aren’t claiming anything outrageous when they say there probably isn’t a God. In fact they aren’t claiming anything substantial at all, because really, how the fuck would they know?” Yes, and vice versa: What’s the ontological proof? Spufford is short on arguments that would cause Christopher Hitchens to budge an inch from the position of nonbelief, but his cause seems more personal than all that: He’s explaining his belief in the context of what he brightly calls “the human tendency, the human propensity to fuck things up”—that is, to lay waste to all the things that matter and then spend the rest of our lives either trying to patch them up or trying to pretend that it doesn’t matter. “I don’t care about heaven,” he professes. “I want, I need, the promise of mending.”
C.S. Lewis might not approve of the language, but he’d surely approve of the sentiment. A thought-provoking entertainment.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-230045-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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