A slim book that will resonate with the reader’s inner biker/philosopher.
A book-length essay connecting the profane and the profound, as a biker with a master’s degree in classics (and a translator of ancient Greek and Latin) contemplates a life not always well spent.
Though categorized as an essay, the book has two parts and chapters within them. The first part is mostly about the all-American concept of freedom, as exemplified in Easy Rider. Toward the end of this part, Fishbone relates the story of his attending an autopsy after earlier chapters showed how easily he and his friends could have been the subjects of one. “I felt a strange detachment which I’m not sure ever really left me,” he writes of the experience, described in vivisectionist’s detail. “I couldn’t get the idea out of my head that we were all just bags of guts, dragging around in the air.” In the second part of the book, Fishbone is a little less descriptive and experiential and more philosophical. It begins with the voices the author has heard, ones that may or may not be God’s, but which he is certain are not his own interior voice. He had been reluctant to resume motorcycling after a drunken accident that might have—perhaps should have—killed him. Until that voice says, “Alan, get a Harley and drive to Death Valley.” Which he did, even though Death Valley is way across the country from the upper Midwest and he’s never bought into the cult of Harley. The trip turns into a meditation on the Platonic conception of the soul, as the author weighs scientific evidence that there’s no such thing as the soul against spiritual certainty that there is. “It takes a soul to believe in the soul,” he writes. A couple of final chapters on animal instincts and a birth bring the meditation full circle.
A slim book that will resonate with the reader’s inner biker/philosopher.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-86547-834-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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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