Boyd (Mystics, Magicians, and Medicine People, 1989) serves as traveling secretary and appreciative witness to the actions of Mad Bear, a Tuscarora medicine man, in this pedantic account of their travels in the late 1970s. The pair take a spiritual and geographical journey across the United States, attending lectures and conferences devoted to healing, spirituality, and ecological and political awareness in the company of swamis, rabbis, Tibetan lamas, holistic practitioners, Japanese monks, and a panoply of other equally ethereal characters. They even appear as guests of honor at Bob Dylan's ``Rolling Thunder Review''; later, Mad Bear's tribe fetes the entire cast on the Tuscarora reservation, where Dylan is assaulted by a mousetrap and huffily leaves. If at first it is not clear to the reader that the white man has despoiled the earth and has ``assured the end of contemporary civilization,'' Boyd and his mentor deliver enough homilies and polemicize so thoroughly that the point is soon made in spades. In this New Age-y document, the reader learns that spaceships, recorded in a petroglyph on a rock wall in Arizona, brought to earth the first Native Americans; that a miniature race of beings whom Mad Bear calls ``The Little People'' has evolved side by side with humans (he has a skull the size of a Ping-Pong ball to prove it); and that Mad Bear is unceasingly clairvoyant, forever reading Boyd's thoughts—conveyed, like the dialogue, in trashy prose. As a character, Mad Bear is something of a self-promoter, although before his death in 1985 he apparently earned widespread recognition in the Native American community for his political mediating powers and his font of traditional spiritual knowledge. With a more lucid tone, this account of a medicine man's unusual life might have attracted a readership beyond fans of Boyd's previous works.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-671-75945-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
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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