Though Shakespeare fans may feel defensive, Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and...
What happens in the rush to gain the world? We lose our souls, of course—and, Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; Why Football Matters, 2014, etc.) adds, our ideals to boot.
“The profound stories about heroes and saints are passing from our minds,” writes the author on the first page. They’re passing from our minds because we are so occupied with making money, that most realistic of endeavors, that we have forgotten even the barest outlines of how to be idealistic. If this seems a grumpy-old-man jeremiad, Edmundson avoids get-off-my-lawn, Harold Bloom–ian impulses by almost immediately settling on a most unlikely culprit: namely, William Shakespeare, whom he credits for putting our minds onto the matters of the bourgeois age so thoroughly that he finds, and we find, “little use for chivalry and the culture of heroic honor.” Other players in Edmundson’s drama of the great states of Self and Soul include Freud, Plato, Blake, Tolstoy, Buddha, Jesus, and Donne, to say nothing of Frye and Pound. In short, it’s the usual who’s who of the Humanities 101 of yore, though that course has now given way to less heady surveys. Edmundson identifies three central virtues: courage, compassion, and contemplation. Each has found numerous interpretations; the author, for example, contrasts Achilles and Hector in the Homeric poems, the former as an example of self-interest, the latter as one of self-sacrifice, each addressing the matter of courage in different ways. Edmundson’s essays are smart and to the point, and there are some very good turns, as when he lists all the positive things that come from a life devoted to contemplating the ideal. A big-screen TV is not among them, but, he counsels by way of consolation, “having freed yourself, you will make others free.”
Though Shakespeare fans may feel defensive, Edmundson delivers a welcome championing of humanistic ways of thinking and living.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-08820-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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