In the main, uninspired and trite.
A melodramatic, overwritten examination of present-day virtue—or the lack of it.
This investigation of the Ten Commandments and how far Americans have fallen from their standard began as a series that staff correspondent Hedges (War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, 2002, etc.) wrote for the New York Times. He now devotes a chapter to each commandment and chronicles the stories of quirky individuals whose lives intersect with each. The chapter on the Sabbath, for example, describes the outré Friday-night rituals of pediatricians Stephen Arpadi and Terry Marx, who drink Shabbat vodka gimlets and allow their kids to watch a video, Shabbat TV. He also tells us that letting go is an integral part of parenthood; that “all love hurts”; and that love “is difficult and hard” and “filled with a transformative power.” Self-help pabulum of this kind might be expected from a Hallmark Hall of Fame special, but not from a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. The most engaging section is the transcript of a controversial antiwar commencement speech Hedges gave in 2003 at Rockford College. He was practically booed off the stage, and he transcribes every heckle the audience hurled at him. It’s a revealing slice of Americana, though perhaps only tenuously connected to Hedges’s putative theme of honoring one’s parents. Another failing is Hedges’s grandly capacious interpretation of the commandments: ironically, this roominess may even allow ordinary readers to wiggle out of the commandments’ range. Take the chapter on adultery, for instance. Hedges profiles a man named H.R. Vargas, whose father left his mother and took up with another woman while Vargas was in utero. Vargas, now a father himself, is still battling the emotional consequences of this early abandonment. The story is powerful—but abstract: one wonders whether the tale of an ordinary, white-collar office affair might have cut a little closer to home for most readers.
In the main, uninspired and trite.Pub Date: June 7, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-5513-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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