Easterbrook (A Moment on the Earth, 1995), a journalist, believes that the biblical God, interpreted as a deity in progress, provides sophisticated secularists with a reason to read the Bible—but his own highly selective and simplifying reading of that ancient text will engage few who know it more than passingly. At a time when biblical scholars such as John Dominic Crossan, Raymond Brown, and James Kugel are publishing major works of biblical interpretation for wide, nonspecialist audiences, it is the bold amateur indeed who claims, as Easterbrook does, to “propose a new understanding of Western scripture.” The author acknowledges a predecessor in Jack Miles, whose popular book, God: A Biography, takes the biblical God for an analyzable literary character. But Easterbrook aims at more: to rethink the Bible for the spiritual use of jaded secularists, whose Freudian, materialist, and scientist culture has all but blinded their religious senses. The first few chapters summarize the origins of modern doubt; the middle ones argue for a less than omnipotent God, whose slow progress from wrathfulness to love models the proper course of human growth; the final chapters crystallize the book’s central theme, that spiritual progress is always away from institutions and rites toward neighborly love. Easterbrook reads much into the Bible’s failure to declare God omnipotent; but that silence is less an oblique sanction to humanize the divine than a sign of how little interested the biblical writers were in abstract metaphysical concepts. The larger difficulty with a progressive view of the biblical God is that it must ignore too many countervailing passages: already mercy is stronger than wrath in the early Exodus version of the Ten Commandments, and wrath is rampant in the late New Testament book of Revelation. Literary interpretations of the Bible are always welcome; but the Bible as literature is too complex comfortably to sport the evolutionary straitjacket Easterbrook has prepared for it.
Pub Date: Sept. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-16065-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
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
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
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