It’s an artifice, sure, but compared to nonsense like The Secret, indie spiritualism has a lot going for it—maybe even some...
In a mixed bag of introspective insights and navel-gazing, Grosso tells the story of how he finally entered recovery after years of drug and alcohol abuse, which set him on the path of investigating his spiritual side far outside of organized religion.
It’s a bit like mid-1990s MTV meets New-Age mysticism, and they have a tattooed hipster baby. To give the author credit, it sounds like he was truly messed up before he got his act together, and his explorations may appeal to Daily Show viewers who feel like they need a shot of new-time religion. The book is composed of short, easily consumed chapters kicked off with quotes from usual suspects like Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley and Charles Bukowski and carrying titles like “The Tao of Checking Yourself” and “Jesus, Hitler, Bieber, Slayer & God.” It’s a collection that’s likely to cause mixed reactions, much like the work of journalist Neal Pollack, who retired from his own celebrated superstardom to study yoga—at which Grosso makes a few good-natured swipes (the yoga, not Pollack). There are good moments, like the way Grosso describes reaching a state of meditative bliss during an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. How you feel about the pseudo-advice in lines like, “You were born to be real, not to be perfect,” will probably depend on your own spiritual sense of well-being at the time, though more cynical readers are likely to raise an eyebrow or two here and there. That’s even truer of Grosso’s postmodern experiences, littered with self-promotional links, like discovering the meaning of life while scrolling Facebook. For the record, the meaning of life is “Be cool” and “Don’t be an asshole.”
It’s an artifice, sure, but compared to nonsense like The Secret, indie spiritualism has a lot going for it—maybe even some actual sincerity.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58270-462-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beyond Words/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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