In lesser Joseph Campbell style, the brainchild deity is viewed as archetype, traced over the millennia as the union of masculine/feminine, the Jungian anima/animus. In the second tribute to Athena this year (after Lee Hall's, see p. 352), Shearer, a London-Oxford Jungian analyst, finds nearly inexhaustible inspiration in the goddess of wisdom and warfare. Athene opens strongly with a summary of Athena/Pallas/Minerva's classical heritage, particularly her significance in Athens' Panathenaean ceremony and her more distant pagan manifestation as Sulis Minerva in Bath. Shearer is less diligent in arguing her thesis of the masculine-feminine deity, however, as she expands it to draw archetypal parallels with other deities: the Celtic Morrigan, the Sumerian Inanna, the Egyptian Neith, the Indian Kali, and less recognizable prehistoric goddesses. The author's arguments become progressively looser and less compelling as she canvasses the Athene-streak in Christian theology (Eve, Mary, and Sophia, i.e., Wisdom incarnate), Elizabethan politics and alchemy, and the Victorian ideals of femininity. Shearer unearths some interesting historical tidbits for symbolic touchstones: Florence Nightingale kept a pet owl named Athena, and Freud had a favorite statue of the goddess on his desk (which he described as ``perfect, only that she has lost her spear''). Discussing the modern significance of the goddess, Shearer hopes for a return to a golden-age matriarchal society of peacefulness—with Athena embodied by the ``Greenham Women'' protesting American cruise missiles rather than by the Boadicea-like Margaret Thatcher. Throughout, Shearer's prose suffers most from an affected matiness, reflected in the ostentatiously slangy translations of Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, et al., which are currently in vogue in England. Rather than sounding up-to-date, the forced conversational tone makes the reader feel trapped in a nervy Oxbridge tutorial. (24 pages b&wh illustrations)
Pub Date: July 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-670-85797-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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