An impressive compendium with a sense of shared discovery.
The life of the historical Buddha, his legacy, and his enduring relevance.
Indian-born novelist Mishra (The Romantics, 2000) begins in a secluded Himalayan valley with little more than an impulse: he wants to write about Siddartha Gautama (ca. 563–483 b.c.e.) but needs to know more. The quest evolves into a personal pilgrimage. The twist: actually visiting the Buddha’s birthplace in Nepal, or trekking to other long-forgotten and ignored sacred sites in his native northern India, turns out to be not all that evocative of the pampered princeling who renounced material comforts to seek enlightenment. More resonant, the author finds, is his cumulative impact on Western thinkers in the modern era. Neatly subsumed into the Hindu pantheon eons ago by India’s threatened Brahmins, edged out of ancient China by the great wave of Confucian ideas, the Buddha bobs up again with Nietzsche, Hermann Hesse, et al., in a world facing the great conflagrations of the 20th century. Suffering, after all, was his bag—as Allen Ginsberg surely must have put it—but it’s still been an impressive revival, Mishra proposes, for someone who apparently wrote nothing down and may not even have been literate, about whom far less is known for certain than either the historical Jesus or Mohammed. Writing flatly and unemotionally, more as an intellectual admirer than a disciple, the author does manage to gather up and fit together a lot of Buddhist lore and codified principles, including a range of variations in worship among directly surviving enclaves from Tibet to Southeast Asia. The Enlightened One’s supposed last words alone, rendered somewhat inelegantly here as “all conditioned things are subject to decay, strive on untiringly,” probably contain enough mystery to keep scholars and disciples delving for centuries more.
An impressive compendium with a sense of shared discovery.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-374-14836-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2004
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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