Interesting, but not insightful.
A quirky, ultimately unsatisfying investigation of religious belief.
Journalist Hallman (The Chess Artist, 2003) set out to get at the essence of religious commitment by exploring communities that inhabit the “fringe” of America’s faith landscape, from Druids to the monks of New Skete. He lunched with one of the nation’s leading Satanists, and with members of the evangelical Christian Wrestling Federation. He joined a group of Michigan-based atheists in their Godless March. While hanging out with Wiccans, he discovered some contradictions in this Goddess-worshipping, earth-friendly spirituality: Though ostensibly feminist and green, modern-day Wicca was founded by men and flourishes in cities. William James’s 1902 study The Varieties of Religious Experience guides this inquiry. Indeed, the great fin-de-siècle psychologist becomes the author’s spiritual doktorvater, and woven throughout these reports from the religious front are reflections on James’s life and thought. Sometimes the forays into his writing are illuminating: Hallman’s description of the monks of New Skete, who breed and write books about dogs, is enriched by James’s observations about the relationship between dogs and their owners. But often such asides are more distracting than instructive, and at times—when, for example, the author detours from a Wiccan conference in Seattle to a paragraph about James’s distaste for the Emerald City—they seem no more than an elaborate game of association. Hallman’s reporting is vivid, his prose sure and clear. But the book has a voyeuristic tone; both intrigued and repelled by his subject, the author trades in spectacle. He asks incidental ironies to do too much work, as when he hears a Satanist sneeze and says, “Bless you!” Hallman fails, finally, to offer enough analysis. The trip into Wicca, Satanism, canine monasticism and devout atheism has been fun, but what are we to make of it?
Interesting, but not insightful.Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-4000-6172-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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