Covers the Great Fire like a blanket. (16 pp. b&w illustrations, not seen)
A robust account from Christopher Wren biographer Tinniswood (His Invention So Fertile, 2002) of the fire that reduced much of Wren’s London to ashes in 1666.
In the mid-17th century it was the third largest city in the Western world (after Constantinople and Paris), a swarm of 300,000 souls, a hub of commerce, and a scuzzy place if there ever was one: “noisy, filthy, and smelly . . . butchers’ offal lay rotting in the narrow streets, and human waste blocked open drains.” A little fire clearance might not have been such a bad thing for London, except that 13,200 dwellings went up in smoke, more than 80 percent of the old, walled city. Coming on the heels of a terrible plague, the year 1666 (“an Apocalyptical and mysterious number,” noted one contemporary astrologer) indeed brought fire, if not the stink of brimstone. Tinniswood’s recounting of the conflagration is very busy, though comfortably so. He sweeps from the political stage to the mob in the streets, analyzes social contracts and building styles, airs conspiracy theories and examines local xenophobia, as he follows the fire from its start in a baker’s shop, a flame so small the Lord Mayor declared “a woman could piss it out,” through its spread via high winds to quarters far and wide. The author does particularly well in unraveling the many suspicions that flew in the fire’s wake: it was Dutch revenge for the English bonfire at West-Terschelling, people speculated, or a Popish plot, or the work of the Almighty pointing a finger at King Charles the Dissolute. Tinniswood is also adroit in drawing a sensible picture of the reconstruction of London, delineating its many players and their shifting intents within the broad context of the Rebuilding Act, the Fire Court, and the nasty eruptions of religious intolerance that kept cropping up like spot fires after the blaze.
Covers the Great Fire like a blanket. (16 pp. b&w illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-57322-244-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
