Ethical ambition isn’t an oxymoron, says Bell, but a winding road that likely feeds the spirit more than the pocketbook.
In a quietly energizing treatise, Bell (Constitutional Law/NYU School of Law; Confronting Authority, 1994, etc.) addresses the question of living ethically and with fulfillment.
The author speaks from experience about how to maintain integrity while seeking success, how to square ambition and dreams in a competitive marketplace while holding true to a sense of right. He gave up tenure at Harvard in protest over the lack of minority women faculty, and for the same reasons a deanship at the University of Oregon. It must be understood that what Bell means by ambition is accomplishment, not power or money (“We live in a system that espouses merit, equality, and a level playing field, but exalts those with wealth, power, and celebrity, however gained”). He throws his lot with the ethical route: “. . . a good job well done, giving credit to others, standing up for what you believe in, voluntarily returning lost valuables, choosing what feels right over what might feel good right now.” This means social justice, a respect for humanity, for speaking out to honor oneself and one’s convictions to achieve a self-sustaining dignity that no amount of money can buy. Bell concedes that it isn’t simple knowing when to take risks or how to appreciate “the potentially dangerous and destructive consequences of words and actions intended to do good,” but he also knows that mistakes and failures are inevitable and must be learned from. Nor does he claim to be a paragon of righteousness, admitting to inertia and attempts to avoid confrontation. Yet he tries “to live the life I sing about in my song”: accepting compromise only to a point, keeping a steady passion for integrity, doing good works of faith, taking cues from role models—including Charlie Chaplin and Medgar Evers—and staying wary for the practical reason that when income is endangered, so are ethics.
Ethical ambition isn’t an oxymoron, says Bell, but a winding road that likely feeds the spirit more than the pocketbook.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-205-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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