Unlike The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and The Architecture of Happiness, this installment in the author’s oeuvre is...
De Botton (A Week at the Airport, 2010, etc.) suggests ways a secular society can provide the benefits and comfort its citizens once derived from faith.
The author’s central argument is credible: Religions “serve two central needs…which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill”—the need for community and the need for consolation in the face of life’s ills and evils. The devil is in the details, as de Botton cherry-picks isolated rituals from Catholicism, Judaism and Buddhism and proposes some not-very-persuasive modern equivalents (e.g., an Agape Restaurant designed to be “a secular descendant of the Eucharist” and a museum that offers spiritual guidance by organizing its artworks into subsets such as the Gallery of Self-knowledge and the Gallery of Compassion). Yes, the Jewish Day of Atonement provides an orderly format for acknowledging that we all injure others and all must learn to forgive. The idea that we can replace this timeworn practice with a billboard ad promoting Forgiveness in lieu of a sneaker brand is insulting to believers and atheists alike. When the author tosses off such comments as, “[o]ur artistic scene might benefit from greater collaborations between thinkers and makers of images, a marriage of best ideas with their highest expression,” he seems to have forgotten about the horrors wrought in service to that principle by Stalin and Hitler, to name only two political leaders who fancied they knew best what artists should say. The author displays a similar historical insouciance when he implies there has been no transcendent, spiritually nourishing architecture since the cathedrals, ignoring several centuries of train stations, libraries and government buildings expressing a monumental faith in civic culture that may languish today but was once a real force in public life.
Unlike The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work and The Architecture of Happiness, this installment in the author’s oeuvre is shallow and glib.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-37910-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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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