by Jacob Needleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 24, 2009
An erudite, challenging text full of difficult questions, but it answers the title question with little more than a...
Memoir about coming to grips with the concept of God.
Though born into a Jewish family, Needleman (Philosophy/San Francisco State Univ.; Why Can’t We Be Good?, 2007, etc.) grew up without an interest in religion and eventually became an atheist. He spent his young adulthood in complete disdain of religion—one night he burned a copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions—preferring instead to seek truth through the great works of philosophy. However, an early teaching job forced him to begin reading about Judaism and Christianity, and what he learned surprised him. An encounter with the works of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber especially impressed him. Though Needleman did not agree with the theism of the writers he was exploring, he admitted that their teachings were worthwhile. The author narrates a nostalgic, occasionally tedious and angst-ridden intellectual journey, vividly recalling the authors and ideas that helped form his worldview, including metaphysics, Zen Buddhism, Immanuel Kant and many more. Needleman also describes classroom experiences that shaped his understanding of God. Ultimately, it was the writings of the Armenian spiritual teacher George Gurdjieff and the influence of Gurdjieff’s protégée, Jeanne de Salzmann, that most influenced the author. Their teachings led him to see one’s attention as foremost in spiritual experience, and “higher attention,” a sort of energetic self-awareness, as the closest thing to history’s concept of God. Though Needleman declares that these conclusions are not mystical, readers may find only a semantic difference.
An erudite, challenging text full of difficult questions, but it answers the title question with little more than a whispered answer.Pub Date: Dec. 24, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-58542-740-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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