One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer’s...
A diffuse tale of spiritual misadventure.
A supposed holy man, camped with cultish followers in a remote corner of Arizona, dallies with a student/colleague. In a Clinton-esque twist, he maintains that he has not had sex with her, a mortal, but with the goddess she embodies and thus remains celibate. The student/goddess leaves him to take up with a coreligionist. The two leave the community for exile in the nearby mountains, where he dies of exposure. That’s just the barest outline of a tale that becomes stranger with each added detail. Heavily reported in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and other outlets, the story was yet another in a long list of cautionary examples about the dangers of cults. Bringing little new to the account and underemphasizing the guru’s outlier status in the topography of Buddhism in the West, Carney (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, 2011) adds value mostly in his considerations of what motivates people to yield to the will of potentially dangerous leaders: “Looked at from one perspective, his plunge toward enlightenment is an obvious case of madness. Yet lurking in the shadows of the cave where he died are clues about the idiosyncratic reasons Americans have adapted Eastern mysticism to their own ends.” It’s a potentially fruitful path, but Carney stumbles around on it, the narrative becoming a loosely connected set of observations on how meditation works and how weird true believers can be.
One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer’s sense of insight into what drives people in their quest of something beyond.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-861-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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