A serviceable overview, but readers seeking an informed study of Islam will want something meatier than this.
A timely gathering of articles and essays on a rapidly expanding, influential faith.
“Understanding Islam is . . . imperative to anyone wanting to make sense of living in the twenty-first century,” writes Islamist Akbar S. Ahmed in his introduction to this anthology, assembled by packagers Miller and Kenedi. Given recent world events, Ahmed’s claim seems entirely valid; with militant, fundamentalist Islam on the rise in many countries, with secular regimes there ever embattled, and with the seemingly rising conflict between the Western and Muslim spheres, knowing more about the religion and cultures of Islam is an incontestably good thing. This is a modest contribution toward that end, drawing on much-anthologized work by the likes of Bernard Lewis, Karen Armstrong, and V.S. Naipaul, among other well-credentialed contributors. The usefulness of this collection comes a sentence here, a sentence there, as when the great Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski notes in passing that “Shiites not only reject the authority of the caliphs, they barely tolerate any lay authority at all,” which helps explain the power of ayatollahs and imams in places like Iran and Lebanon, and as when Foreign Affairs editor Fareed Zakaria explains why militants have managed to have their way unopposed in so many hitherto moderate Islamic societies: “Moderate Muslims are loath to criticize or debunk the fanaticism of the fundamentalists. Like the moderates in Northern Ireland, they are scared of what would happen to them if they speak their mind.” Overall, however, Inside Islam will harbor no surprises for anyone who keeps up with the op-ed pages or who has taken a course in comparative religions.
A serviceable overview, but readers seeking an informed study of Islam will want something meatier than this.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56924-568-1
Page Count: 262
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
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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