Celtic polytheism, Christian monotheism, and scientific rationalism, all tied neatly together into an Irish arabesque.
A natty physical and spiritual geography of Ireland’s holy Mount Brandon.
For the last three decades, the author has spent part of each year in his house on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula at the foot of Mount Brandon. Hundreds of times he has made the pilgrimage to the summit. This is not a purely recreational climb; science writer Raymo (The Path, 2003, etc.) experiences it as a foray into a slice of the Celtic soul as well as a walk through geological time. He sees the mountain as “a great, black, boggy, cloud-capped hump rising from the sea”; Gaelic is still spoken on its flanks, and there is a scraggy wildness to the glens. The writer may be questing after the symbolic side of Brandon, but his eyes are ever peeled at the lay of the land, and there are some lovely descriptions of his treks: once he made his way between ancient remnants of mountainside fortifications in the company of a dozen red admiral butterflies. He is also attuned to the mountain’s associations as a refuge from invaders and enclosure laws, as well as a solitary vigil post for saints. These associations make for fascinating reading because they illustrate the singular fusion of faiths that characterized a certain period in Irish history, when monotheism and polytheism overlapped and “what Celtic Christianity offered Europe was a religion of celebration and praise, in which God is manifest in every element of everyday life.” Further back still, Raymo details how the tilt of the Earth’s axis relative to the Sun gave rise to early paganism, standing stones, and stone circles. He has found his own space between “a religion—continental Christianity—that preached the fallen state of nature, on the one hand, and an exaggerated Enlightenment rationalism that saw nature as little more than an object of dispassionate investigation.”
Celtic polytheism, Christian monotheism, and scientific rationalism, all tied neatly together into an Irish arabesque.Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8027-1433-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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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