Heidegger as ho-daddy? The approach is unusual, but to fruitful—and entertaining—ends.
I surf, therefore I am: a good-natured exploration of some of the big questions philosophy raises, all while hanging 10.
In this nimble set of essays on topics such as work and freedom, James (Philosophy/Univ. of California, Irving; Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump, 2016, etc.) gives a fine if idiosyncratic account of how philosophers puzzle out the world—idiosyncratic because it’s framed from the point of view of a surfer. Now, existentialism is one thing, existential threat quite another. One of the biggest questions facing any thinking person is how to deal with climate change, on which James consults a South African fellow wave-rider, who offers one approach to the problem, saying, “Bru, don’t stress.” That’s all well and good, but of course it’s not the end of the question, and James allows that maybe some stress may be necessary and that contingency suggests that “the surfer can contribute by not working and going surfing instead,” checking out of the industrial/capitalist system that is doing so much damage. But more: as the author writes elsewhere, surfing evokes the better angels, teaching its practitioners to cultivate “the highest expression of human perceptual capacity, the human’s way of at once being and doing.” When you start talking being and doing, then you’re in Sartrian territory, and though it’s hard to imagine the diminutive French philosopher riding the big waves, it’s not hard to see his influence on James’ declaration that “surfing is freedom”—even if Sartre would qualify the statement by insisting that freedom is something more than simply not “working a crap job (here defined as a job that consistently requires missing good waves).” Throughout, the book is provocative and less laid-back than it might appear at first glance. A 12-page glossary defines some surfing and philosophy terms alike.
Heidegger as ho-daddy? The approach is unusual, but to fruitful—and entertaining—ends.Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-54073-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
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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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