Now that Dershowitz, the noted Harvard Law School professor and celebrity defense attorney, has told American Jews what wusses they are (Chutzpah, 1991), he sets out to tell them how to ensure their community's survival into the 21st century. In the past, he claims, Jewish cohesion and continuity were based on negative qualities: fear of anti-Semitism and a tribal mentality. The younger generation today, however, feels physically secure from persecution and is culturally assimilated—to the point where the survival of American Jewry is threatened more by this internal danger than external ones. Hardly original and a bit superficial as analysis, but the real devil is in the details of his case. One could point to Dershowitz's self-aggrandizing inaccuracies, such as his pretension of putting in the open a topic (assimilation) that has been only ``whispered'' about, while in fact it has been a primary concern of the Jewish community since the release of the 1990 National Jewish Population Survey. Dershowitz relies on its statistics to project a dismal future if American Jews don't follow his proposals. The study's statistics, however, are hotly debated by scholars. Dershowitz's solution? Let a thousand Judaisms bloom: ``There is no one substantive essence to Judaism,'' he argues dubiously. Thus, young people need not be turned off by any one view of Judaism; they're all equally valid. He begs the question, of course, of what Judaism becomes when it is so broadly defined as ``a Judaism of ideas, of attitudes, of skepticism, of justice, of compassion, of argumentation, and of inclusiveness'' rather than as a set of specific beliefs and a code of action. Dershowitz is right to emphasize the need for good, intensive Jewish education, and he is convincing in his description of the importance Judaism plays in his own life. But he's not convincing in the idea that a Judaism in which everyone can have it any which way they want is a Judaism that will have lasting power in the century to come. (Author tour; TV/radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: March 19, 1997
ISBN: 0-316-18133-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
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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