Harry Potter and the Premenopausal Feminist.
Sometime London-based TV producer and writer Wilde (On the Trail of the Women Warriors, 2000) offers a “nonfiction narrative” of her quest for spirituality via rituals assembled from beliefs supposedly practiced in “Neolithic” Britain.
The author portrays herself as despondent over her fiancé’s death and seeking solace in booze when, now some 20 years ago, she encounters an “Afro-Celtic” woman in Liverpool whose eyes have “triple irises”—the whole book is like this—and who advises her that she, Wilde, is actually a “woman warrior” in search of her destiny. Wilde is then passed to Cyril (no last names here), a shadowy figure who may or may not be a prophet, for initiation into rituals derived primarily from Welsh mythology. She immediately transfers a self-confessed obsession with “what existed before creation” into the context provided by Cyril, and the adventures begin. If Carlos Castañeda, to whom Wilde occasionally refers as a like-minded pioneer in native spiritualities, had only known that such trances, visions, transports to space-time fields, spiral castles, dragon’s lairs, and other figments of the “Otherworld” were available through mere ingestion of Guinness and an occasional whisky, he might have spared himself the risk of peyote. And if visions, per se, can have the ring of illegitimacy, these do: in one, Wilde encounters a “huntress” with a bow and arrow—no mention of a quiver; in another, a strange “French woman” heard from a distance as she strolls up a beach smoking a Gauloise and humming the “Marseillaise.” At one point, Wilde marches off alone into a moonless night to find a circle of standing stones; a few weeks later, in a darkened room, she reveals an ongoing paralytic terror of the dark. “Sexual energy” constantly flows among the companions she chooses to act out a creation myth based on both incestuous rape and—why not?—“virgin birth,” with indecipherable results.
Harry Potter and the Premenopausal Feminist.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58542-182-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
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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