The well-trod ground of ecospiritualism is trundled over once again by Spretnak (The Politics of Women's Spirituality, 1981, etc.). Modernism is Spretnak's unoriginal bugbear: It can be found tattering the social fabric; it lurks behind the disintegration of the economy, health care, everyday life, ethnic and racial hatreds. Modernism is the deep structure repressing the ``real,'' imposing discontinuities ``between humans and the rest of the natural world, between self and others, between body and mind.'' Economic expansion and technological innovation, Modernism's frayed mantras, are little but the mechanistic blatherings of an ideology gone sour, Spretnak intones. The body is not a biomachine requiring external intervention upon breakdown; it is a self-correcting energy system. Nature is not simply matter to be acted upon; it is a dynamic, self-regulating cosmos. Place is not just where you are, but an influential ecosocial frame. Yes, yes. The mingling of body- mind/cosmos/place is where Spretnak situates the ``real,'' so she mooches about in the theories of chaos, complexity, and Gaia, and in the works of John Ruskin, William Morris, and revolutionary artistic movements to buttress her point. And they are points well taken but here made ponderously and without a whit of humor. The writing is lumbered, and Spretnak comes across as schoolmarmish and scolding: ``Ironically, the counterculture of the sixties was dismissed as romantic even though its ignorance of the Romantics was almost total.'' She is drawn to the dry, high-minded ``geologian'' Thomas Berry, reasonably enough, but her position is impoverished when she ignores the spirited intellectual high jinks of Paul Feyerabend and others who so nimbly eviscerated the notion of modernity. ``The gist of all this is that life is an interactive phenomenon of planetary and biospheric scale.'' Stop the presses.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-201-53419-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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