An invigorating, tremendous work of scholarship.
A smart and entertaining “biography” of Socrates as shaped against the great experiment of democracy in 5th-century BCE Athens.
British historian and journalist Hughes (Helen of Troy, 2005) again seizes an elusive subject and fleshes it out by depicting the world around it. In this case, the Athenian philosopher who never wrote a word of his own springs to life through the work of his contemporaries (Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon) and the record of his trial and death by hemlock poison for not acknowledging the city’s gods and for corrupting the youth. Socrates lived during the Golden Age of a virile, proud Athens, in which the spirit of open inquiry, justice and civic participation flourished among the common people, the demos. Unaffiliated with any school and content to roam barefoot and simply clad through Athens’s Agora engaging people in dialogue about how man could best lead a virtuous life, Socrates presented his listeners, often impressionable young men, with a moral challenge: What is the point of wealth if you are not happy? What is beauty? Who deserves power? Above all, Socrates goaded his followers to look deeper and to ask questions—a powerful and increasingly dangerous message in a new democracy that would soon be torn apart by plague, the Peloponnesian War and the rule of tyrants. Hughes thrillingly navigates the life stages of her subject. The young son of humble people, born just as Athens was constructing its Acropolis and Pericles came to glory, Socrates sowed his wild oats among the prostitutes in the city’s Kerameikos red-light district, enjoyed early association as a soldier with the beautiful Alcibiades and frequented the gyms to admire and engage the young men. Love, truth, virtue, the place of women—these were the preoccupations for the wandering sage, but the city had darkened, and Socrates was put on trial as a way of, as Aristotle wrote, “cutting the tops of the tallest ears of corn.”
An invigorating, tremendous work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4179-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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