In this volume of previously unpublished writings (the fifth installment of his journals), Merton speaks of his new life as a hermit and his reactions to contemporary upheavals in the Catholic Church and American society. Having spent over 20 years in the strictly communal life of the Trappist Cistercian Order, Merton finally obtained permission to live in solitude. Although this move was clearly a way for him to follow his bohemian and intellectual bent, it gave expression to his deep desire to seek God absolutely, free from the trivia that often complicated life in the Abbey. These journal entries illustrate both modes of Merton's existence. He discusses his omnivorous (and apparently random) reading of such writers as Rilke, Nietzsche, Neruda, Flannery O'Connor, and Simone Weil. He corresponds with contemporary intellectuals, including the Buddhist scholar Marco Pallis and Zen master D.T. Suzuki, even visiting the latter in New York. We see Merton's exasperation with US policy in Vietnam and with the South's racial practices, his excitement at developments in the Catholic Church's Second Vatican Council, and his misgivings at the Church's liturgical changes (e.g., the Passion Gospel read in English instead of sung in Latin strikes him as ``liturgical vaudeville'' and devoid of imagination). Merton supports the peace movement and distrusts the optimistic clichÇs of contemporary American culture, lamenting an increasingly Americanized world without cultural roots. Vignettes of daily life in the Abbey and in the hermitage form a background for each of these pages. We see Merton struggling with the mediocrity of his abbot and his own inconsistencies. His relentless introspection makes challenging reading, while his copious allusions to spiritual writings down the centuries open to us the sources of his own rich inner life. Merton at his best: sophisticated, honest, humorous, and mystical.
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-065482-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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