French film writer Carriäre (The Return of Martin Guerre, etc.) does most of the talking in this set of conversations with Tibet's world-acclaimed religious leader. Contemporary issues, rather than the finer points of Tantric doctrine and practice, are the subject of these interviews, which took place near Dharamsala in northern India in February 1993. In response to Carriäre's promptings, the Dalai Lama speaks on such themes as the environment, nonretaliation, and how the Buddhist doctrines of interdependence and compassion harmonize with the findings of quantum theory. The Dalai Lama explains his Five Point Peace Plan for an autonomous, if not independent, Tibet, and he endorses birth control in the Third World as a necessity on account of the population explosion, while maintaining that it is ``pernicious'' on the individual level because of the supreme worth of human life in the cycle of rebirth. We are urged to find the inner nature of our minds: The view of the world as essentially competitive is false and ``eliminates any descent into the self, any meditation, and any reflection.'' Carriäre offers some useful background information on Buddhism, but he allows his personality and preoccupations to dominate and tends to railroad the Dalai Lama's profoundly dialectical outlook into his own issues: for example, his facile dismissal of Judaism and Christianity and his open contempt for John Paul II. When he cannot do this, Carriäre is not above patronizing his host, e.g., for holding unenlightened views on sexuality (``On that point he has nothing new to offer us'') and believing in reincarnation. Admirers of the Dalai Lama should not feel they have to add this to their collection.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-385-47960-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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