The straightforward simplicity of these well-intentioned musings might be helpful for young adults with spiritual longings...
A TV producer embarks upon a transcontinental quest for spiritual enlightenment with a childhood friend.
When Richard (his last name is never given) e-mailed out of the blue, both men lived on the West Coast—the author in Los Angeles, Richard in Oregon—but had rarely seen each other since they attended high school in New Jersey 30 years ago. The few times they met while Jackson was climbing the career ladder in documentary films, Richard seemed to be drifting, stubborn to a fault and obsessed with upholding his counterculture standards. Nonetheless, he persuaded the author to drive back East to reconnect with their past. With little in common besides their high-school experiences and lapsed Catholicism, the two were unlikely traveling companions. Their expectations for the journey’s particulars diverged at every turn. Richard was returning in part to unload the emotional baggage of a brutal childhood. Jackson, who was striving to articulate the parameters of his beliefs, sought the mystical renewal of a pilgrimage amid the small towns and truck-stop diners along their route. Richard preferred not to question his private spirituality and hated to stop driving for any reason. The car he had lovingly chosen for their journey, a ’69 Volkswagen Beetle, conspired against them both with unnerving regularity. Plagued by mysterious engine problems, they were frequently forced to detour in search of mechanics and parts in remote towns throughout the Midwest. Along the way, Jackson considered such pressing philosophical dilemmas as what happens when we die, why science can’t reveal life’s meaning and whether commitment to bettering the human community could replace religion as a source of moral guidance. His dull but serviceable prose offers little insightful analysis, and its flourishes are confined to clunky extended metaphors and stale truisms.
The straightforward simplicity of these well-intentioned musings might be helpful for young adults with spiritual longings who are suspicious of organized religion. Mature readers would do better rereading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.Pub Date: April 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9794463-0-6
Page Count: 332
Publisher: End Run Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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