A sobering, useful compendium of questionable deeds most of us know about but would rather not discuss.
A survey of the everyday breakdown of ethical behavior and a strong case for a new emphasis on moral education in America.
Enumerating the modern accumulation of lies, tricks, cheats, and scams by Americans in all walks of life—not just the corporate officers of Enron, Worldcom, and their ilk, but test-cheating students, serial adulterers, tax evaders, plagiarizing journalists, and academics who fake research results—Allen (Law and Philosophy/Univ. of Pennsylvania) also purges herself. She’s haunted by an affair she had with a friend’s husband and by the time she won a prestigious school award by overstating her grades to a teacher she knew would trust her word. Once purged, however, Allen brings to bear on this subject the unusual perspective of an African-American woman who has a Ph.D. but grew up with addicts, alcoholics, and petty criminals in her extended family. Thus her analysis, for example, of why people cheat is informed by both life experience and academic rigor. Try these on: “I cheated because I deserved it; I only cheated because I got cheated first; I’m not wrong, the rule’s a stupid one; nobody got hurt”—and, of course, the ever-popular “everybody does it.” But there’s cheating and there’s, well, what about a padded bra? Cosmetic surgery? Allen gives readers who want to decide for themselves hefty ethical chapter and verse, but fundamentally she finds unethical behavior both “normal and avoidable.” The bad news is that willpower is still the principal answer. Allen does, however, offer solid advice on how to avoid oversimplifying when dealing with the inevitable struggles of children to find and employ an ethical compass. Moral education, even training, she cautions, must extend beyond college and into adulthood.
A sobering, useful compendium of questionable deeds most of us know about but would rather not discuss.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7868-6897-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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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