DR. JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG AND THE RELIGION OF BIOLOGIC LIVING

Name: DR. JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG AND THE RELIGION OF BIOLOGIC LIVING
Author: Brian C. Wilson
ISBN: 978-0-253-01447-4

by Brian C. Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 3, 2014

There’s much here to interest both adherents to and skeptics of today’s alternative and holistic medicines, as well as fans...

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A well-researched biography that seeks to restore the reputation of the doctor satirized in T.C. Boyle’s novel The Road to Wellville (1993) and in the film of the same name.

Wilson (Comparative Religion/Western Michigan Univ.; Yankees in Michigan, 2008, etc.) has done much more than provide a sympathetic biography of the man who headed the once-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, the name John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) gave to the Seventh-Day Adventist’s Western Health Reform Institute when he became its director in 1876. While the author fully explores the doctor’s role there, more important is his examination of the conflicts among various schools of religious, philosophical and scientific thought in the United States at the time. Kellogg struggled to reconcile the science he had learned as a doctor with the teachings of his church; ultimately, his deviation from church doctrines led to his expulsion. Believing that the purity of the body was as important for salvation as the purity of the soul, he developed the concept of biologic living, the rules for which he spelled out in detail in various books and promoted at the sanitarium. The first rule: “Obedience to the laws of life and health is a moral obligation.” Among his many precepts was the forgoing of meat. He taught that since the abandonment of vegetarianism in Eden, the human race has been sliding into decline, manifested by the short life span of modern men. In time, Kellogg became increasingly concerned over what he saw as the threat of race degeneration, devoting the last 30 years of his life to eugenics, the so-called science of improving the human race by controlling heredity. Wilson demonstrates convincingly where Kellogg’s ideas about health reform originated and how they evolved.

There’s much here to interest both adherents to and skeptics of today’s alternative and holistic medicines, as well as fans of American history, especially the history of religions.

Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-253-01447-4

Page Count: 264

Publisher: Indiana Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014

Categories:

PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION

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THE 48 LAWS OF POWER

by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.

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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

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY

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THE LAWS OF HUMAN NATURE
by Robert Greene

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by Robert Greene

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Drake Producing 48 Laws of Power Show

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955

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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.