A spiritual affirmation that provides a welcome alternative to the prevailing belief that maintaining the appearance of...
A Zen Buddhist priest and meditation teacher offers “a user's guide to aging well” by celebrating “the joys and rewards of aging” while accepting the inevitable losses that accompany it.
Richmond (A Whole Life's Work: Living Passionately, Growing Spiritually, 2005, etc.) believes that diet and exercise are only part of the story. He provides a refreshing road map for facing old age optimistically but without the illusion of a fountain of youth. In his mid-60s and having suffered two life-threatening illnesses, Richmond draws on a depth of personal experience about the reality of overcoming fear while recognizing that certain changes are irreversible and certain options are closed to us as we age, even if we are not ill or infirm. The author describes four stages in the “journey of aging,” and he emphasizes that true contentment comes from looking inward. “The spiritual life is all about connection…to oneself as well as others,” and spending time with “your closest and dearest friend—yourself.” While Richmond applies traditional Zen techniques, he does so from an ecumenical standpoint. Each chapter is filled with anecdotes from contemporary life about how people he knew have dealt with the challenges of getting older. Referring to Erik Erikson's “groundbreaking 1950s book Childhood and Society,” Richmond suggests that we often fail to appreciate the wisdom that comes with age and what the elderly have to contribute as mentors.
A spiritual affirmation that provides a welcome alternative to the prevailing belief that maintaining the appearance of youth as long as possible is an antidote to aging.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-592-40690-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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