A motley sheaf of sometimes-absorbing, sometimes-baffling spiritual stanzas.
Internal dialogue is the key to communing with the divine, according to this rapturous but often murky volume of mystical devotions.
Dash, an Indian psychiatrist, dispenses his philosophical teachings in a series of short, one- or two-paragraph prose poems that center on august, thematic figures. One figure is the ineffable Almighty, an entity of love and righteousness that subsumes the individual: “No act is mine; no thought is mine, and no name is mine, neither is any personification,” Dash writes. Another figure, almost as awesome but more down-to-earth, is the author’s mother, a being of “sanity and saintly love” who is “closer to [him] than each drop of blood in [his] arteries.” Dash evokes his mother in tenderly specific terms, departing from his usual abstract tone: “Before dawn she would clean the utensils left dirty from the previous night…giving me some cold rice and curry to eat…do[ing] aarti [, a Hindu ritual,] around a Tulsi plant.” Soon, a “Master” emerges to impart Buddhism-inflected philosophy—“Mind is just a function, and you can make it no mind”—to a vaguely Christ-like “son of the Lord…who is hungry, hunted and weeping.” Dash further elaborates on Yogic-Buddhist principles of happiness, enjoining readers to “attain the value of nothingness,” renounce worldly desires (“sexual and sensual urges are slavery, while celibacy is freedom”) and emulate his own inward meditative journey of “talking to self.” Dash’s loose, free-associational prose shifts through a number of registers, sometimes intimately prayerful, sometimes caustically prophetic—“I shall destroy the world of cruelty, dishonesty, and of massacre”—and includes sketchy stories reminiscent of Kahlil Gibran’s parables. However, the text strains for grand, cryptic pronouncements that often misfire (“In silence the human race slowly progresses towards the time zone, moving relentlessly”). At its best, however, Dash’s poetic imagery feels vivid and fresh: “This moment is like a child carrying a lit candle and progressing towards the church, like the silence of the blue sky in the summer afternoon.”
A motley sheaf of sometimes-absorbing, sometimes-baffling spiritual stanzas.Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482801576
Page Count: 182
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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