An enthralling account of a trifling provocation inflated to epic proportions.
The authors of Wittgenstein’s Poker (2001) once again dissect a contentious encounter between two celebrated philosophers, this time Age of Reason luminaries David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who find it impossible to reason together.
Rousseau, self-professed lover of mankind, didn’t much love individual men and ended up irritating and alienating almost everyone on the continent, except for his dog and his longtime housekeeper/mistress. As his reputation grew, colleagues, governments, churches and kings heartily returned his scorn, censoring his works and routinely banishing him. Nothing could have better pleased one so disposed to see himself as a victim. And no one could have been more ill suited to entanglement in the affairs of the suspicious, nearly paranoid Rousseau than Edinburgh’s sober-sided Hume who, ignoring friends’ warnings, agreed to accompany and sponsor the Genevan’s flight to Britain in 1766. From mutual expressions of esteem and affection, their relationship quickly deteriorated. What caused the rift? Rousseau, who saw plots everywhere against him, overheard Hume talking strangely in his sleep, took offense at anonymous small charities and suspected his benefactor of being the instigator of “the King of Prussia letter,” a lampoon in fact written by Horace Walpole. Not even George III’s offer of a pension, engineered by Hume, could quench Rousseau’s righteous wrath. Accusatory and self-justifying letters flew, and soon the quarrel became public, forcing the 18th-century European intelligentsia and its noble patrons to take sides. James Boswell, Walpole, Adam Smith and Voltaire all play varying roles in the story, a celebrated anecdote in the history of philosophy now available to the general reader in all its delicious, gossipy detail. Edmonds and Eidinow seem especially to delight in the spectacle of the normally genial and mostly blameless Hume flailing, eventually driven to behave as badly as his obsessive antagonist.
An enthralling account of a trifling provocation inflated to epic proportions.Pub Date: March 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074490-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
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
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