A unique though complicated investigation of Buddhism and feminism. Klein (Religious Studies/Rice Univ.) wants to initiate a conversation between Buddhism and Western feminism in order to tackle questions of selfhood. To do this, she juxtaposes what she sees as the feminist dichotomy between essentialism (self as intrinsic and universal womanhood) and postmodernism (all aspects of self are constructed) against the Buddhist dichotomy between the discovery of enlightenment (enlightenment is intrinsic) and developmental enlightenment (enlightenment can be acquired). According to Klein, Western feminism's emphasis on individualism results in the bifurcation of mind and body, obscuring the potentially fruitful balance between them. One method for maneuvering between connection and separateness is the Buddhist practice of mindfulness, ``the ability to sustain a calm, intense, and steady focus.'' Possible nonlinguistic states, silence, and compassion, she says, also have the potential to bridge the different levels of knowledge and to aid in the resolution of mind and body. The Great Bliss Queen, a well-known mythological female figure in some Buddhist traditions, emerges as important to Klein- -largely because there are so few female role models in Buddhism. But the Bliss Queen doesn't have easy answers to the questions Klein proposes. Repeatedly claiming that the conversation between Buddhism and feminism has the potential to offer insights to both, Klein uses technical language about Buddhist practices that obscures some of the more important discoveries. What does emerge is the falsehood of contemporary Western society's belief that an individual can be completely autonomous, with a self independent of community, a possibility that Buddhism finds absurd. In other words, it is possible to share an essential nature that is partially constructed by time and place. What promises to be a powerful analysis appears more and more to reflect Klein's own struggles to reconcile Buddhism and feminism, not accessible to most readers because of its technicality.
Pub Date: Jan. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-8070-7306-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1994
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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