A groundbreaking, impressively researched, and kitsch-filled exploration of how Americans' sacred ``stuff'' both shapes and reflects their religious beliefs. McDannell (coauthor of Heaven: A History, 1988) here offers a fresh scholarly approach to Christianity in America: Instead of focusing on the hackneyed written expressions of elite clergy, she turns her attention to the sacred objects of rank-and-file believers. What do prints, Bibles, domestic shrines, and Jesus T-shirts tell us about religious faith? McDannell criticizes American religionists for ignoring these ``unwritten texts'' and following an iconoclastic Puritan suspicion of holy objects. In correcting this oversight, she demonstrates that not only Catholics but also Protestants and Mormons have a deep affinity for tactile sacred things. The book is strongest when it delves into the home, the realm most often ignored by scholars, and explores what Lourdes holy water, Victorian Bible stands, and needlepoint samplers reveal about their owners' spirituality. Far from being meaningless decor, the author argues, they signify a deep commitment to religion. The chapter on Mormon temple garments offers an especially subtle discussion of the fusion of the ``profane'' body with the ``sacred'' rituals of the temple. Ultimately, McDannell argues that these traditional categories are of little use in understanding American religiosity, as people intentionally seek to bring the sacred into their ``profane'' homes and lives. The author is least cogent when she stretches beyond the scope of the home, ritual objects, and clothing, and individual chapters vary in quality, some essays failing to convey the personalization of the sacred that makes the topic so compelling. One hopes that other historians will follow McDannell's bold lead and attend to this neglected aspect of religious expression. (100 b&w photos and 24 color plates, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-300-06440-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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