Noble (History of Science/York Univ., Canada) argues that the apparent dichotomy between science and religion, between the physical and the spiritual, is an artifact of recent history. He examines nearly 2,000 years of Western history to support his thesis. Noble (A World Without Woman, 1992) cites two early impulses behind the urge to advance in science and technology: the conviction that apocalypse is imminent, and the belief that increasing human knowledge helps recover knowledge lost in Eden. For example, Columbus's writings show that he believed the Orinoco to be one of the rivers of Paradise and expected the End Times to come within a century or so. Indeed, the metaphor of a return to Eden runs through the writings of advocates of science, exploration, and technology from the earliest days. Isaac Newton's religious studies, which seem such a puzzle to moderns, grew out of his belief that, by understanding the divine creation, man fulfills God's plan in preparing for the millennium by perfecting himself. Priestley, Faraday, Clerk-Maxwell, and other giants of Anglo-American science shared his millenarianism. Evolution, which decoupled science from religion, led to a restatement of the millenarian vision as a secular quest for perfection, one that underlies scientific enterprise from NASA to the Human Genome Project. But, says Noble, without the religious underpinnings from which it arose, the quest for perfection leads to technical progress for its own sake—and to Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and other horrors yet to be unveiled. Only by demystifying science and by depriving its practitioners of their quasi-priestly status can we rehumanize it and turn it again to real human needs. Densely argued and supported, but well within the grasp of the nontechnical reader, Noble's thesis is fascinating and in many ways convincing. An important document—and inevitably a controversial one—in the current debates on the role of science in society.
Pub Date: Sept. 9, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-42564-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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