The 1949 exorcism that inspired William Blatty to write The Exorcist, recounted in admirably restrained and documented fashion by an unlikely source: military-expert Allen (Merchants of Treason, 1988, etc.). Unlike Blatty's possessed teenage girl, 14-year-old Robbie Mannheim (a pseudonym) of Mt. Ranier, Maryland, doesn't swivel his head like a top or levitate. But when fruit and then a vase fly through the air in his presence, his middle-class parents call on an M.D., a psychologist, and finally a minister for help. The minister suspects a poltergeist, but when bloody scratches appear on Robbie's body, the reverend tells the family, ``You have to see a Catholic priest. The Catholics know about things like this''- -advice that leads the Mannheims to a local priest whose exorcism of Robbie aborts when the boy slashes him with a mattress spring. The distraught parents take their son to St. Louis, where they meet Fr. William S. Bowdern, a 52-year-old Jesuit attached to St. Louis University. It's Bowdern who conducts the successful weeks-long exorcism, involving nightly incantations by the priest and several assistants as Robbie—who claims to be possessed—spits, urinates, writhes, cackles, and manifests words in blood (``HELL''; ``CHRIST'') on his body until the ``demon'' departs shortly after Easter. To his credit, Allen reports the more sensational aspects of Robbie's ordeal with a poker face, focusing instead on the spiritual and emotional issues involved, providing brief histories of the Jesuits, poltergeists, and possession. In an afterword, he weighs—without judging—the likelihood of Robbie having been possessed, and he discusses his sources, including one eyewitness and, crucially, a hitherto unrevealed daily journal of the exorcism kept by one of Bowdern's assistants. One can't blame Blatty for sleazing up Robbie's plight, but it's good to have Allen's levelheaded account, which allows the apparent facts of this influential case to speak for their own—and compelling—selves.
Pub Date: July 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42034-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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