A collection that offers a range of insights into some of the most difficult metaphysical questions.
A posthumous collection of essays by an author who carefully dissects human relationships with God.
The anonymous author whose essays Smith collects here grapples with difficult questions about the nature of God and existence. Simple assertions about the essays’ purposes, however, would seem inappropriate, out of sync with the spirit of the author’s inquiry. The central essay looks at a cloud of questions that surround the idea of God, approaching each from multiple perspectives. The author takes on several traditions, addressing ideas of nihilistic or hedonistic philosophy, Buddhism, Taoism, and the author’s own religion, Christianity. Among the topics the essay covers are the efficacy of prayer; the nature of truth and whether it contains a valuable concept of God; and the use of the God concept as a model for understanding reality and the utility of that model. If this subject matter sounds somewhat nebulous, it’s because the discussion occasionally is; the author was unable to finish the work before dying and so leaves many questions unanswered. However, the author clearly cares about the sticky nature of these issues, and the discourses’ many mays and coulds show tolerance of various schools of thought and seem agnostic to any grand metaphysical scheme. On more clear-cut issues, however, the author seems more comfortable making assertions: “One must nevertheless beware of false religious, or spiritual, experience.” The collection does favor discussion of specifically Christian concepts and doctrines such as the Fall, but the author is willing to cast aside formulas that don’t seem useful; for example, he writes that a literal Fall is impossible, wondering if it would “be more instructive to look at the issues again, unencumbered by a story that is so contrary to what we now understand about prehistory.” Thoughtful readers may find the essays’ measured tone a refreshing break from more strident texts on either side of the debate about the existence of God.
A collection that offers a range of insights into some of the most difficult metaphysical questions.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1492285304
Page Count: 84
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2013
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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