Controversial author and TV personality Huffington (Picasso: Creator and Destroyer, 1988) calls on society to acknowledge the drive towards transcendence and wholeness that alone can transform our lives. During a stop on her first book tour, Huffington tells us, she was sitting in her room in a European hotel, yellow roses on her desk, Swiss chocolate by her bed, the only sound that of ice crackling as it slowly melted into the water around the French champagne. Suddenly, she knew that worldly success was nothing and heard in her head Peggy Lee's question ``Is this all there is?'' Maybe not quite St. Augustine's voice in the garden, but this was Huffington's conversion, enlightenment, and satori, setting her out, she says, on the journey of 1,000 miles toward the publication, she hoped, of yet another bestseller. Her teaching here is that we are too concerned with three of our basic instincts—survival, procreation, and power—to the detriment of a fourth, which is more intuitive and spiritual. This fourth instinct is proper to human beings, she believes; it inspires all our striving and causes us to evolve as a species. Huffington claims that we are now at the dawn of a new age in which the fourth instinct is imperative for our future. None of this, of course, is very new, and although Huffington has good things to say, she says too many of them and fails to give them the depth they deserve. As she quotes from the Dalai Lama, C.S. Lewis, the New Testament, Joseph Campbell, St. John of Kronstadt (who she claims erroneously was Greek Orthodox), and many other sages, our author seems to be whisking us around some great cocktail party where we meet fascinating people without getting a chance to know them. Thus, she gives an impression of glibness in spite of her sincerity. Profound ideas, superficially treated. (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 10, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-69229-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 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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