Neither fish nor fowl. The footwork is a service, and the stops inherently interesting, but there’s little value added.
A personal tour of America’s roadside Christian kitsch as an earnest and at the same time a condescending religion professor (Case Western Reserve) hauls his family around the country in an RV.
It’s clear what you’re in for right from the start, when Beal (Religion and Its Monsters, 2001, etc.) uses the words “mediate other” to describe introducing his kid to a stranger, then shortly thereafter takes the time to tell us about the dealer he rented his RV from and her cute name for the RV he didn’t rent: meandering quotidian observation adorned with unnecessary academic jargon. Now a self-styled cynic, Beal was raised an evangelical Christian, and like a teenager rebelling against years of Bible camp, he’s too eager to poke fun at simple believers like the creators of Holy Land USA, a crude re-creation of biblical Jerusalem in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Though Beal intends to do for outsider religion what others have done for outsider art, “powers of wry observation” regularly get in the way (nor will his noting an inaccurate species of tree, for example, amuse many readers). He reserves greatest praise for the Precious Moments Chapel, where big-eyed kitsch brings genuine comfort to the bereaved, and for Ave Maria Grotto, where the exceedingly strange Brother Joseph built a miniature Rome. But even here, the academic’s appreciation is compromised by the apostate’s jibes. Among other stops are Orlando’s scarily Disneyfied Holy Land Experience; two biblically themed miniature golf courses; a slowly growing roadside Ark, built by a man who believes himself to be a modern Noah (a recurring theme); and Paradise Gardens, the creation of the late, celebrated folk artist Howard Finster, who illustrated albums for the Talking Heads and REM in the ’90s.
Neither fish nor fowl. The footwork is a service, and the stops inherently interesting, but there’s little value added.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-1062-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
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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