One can only hope that Wills will expand his project and give us the Testimony whole.
An exacting—and exciting—new translation and discussion of the first book of Augustine’s Confessiones by an accomplished and prolific stylist and classicist (Venice: Lion City, below, etc.).
It’s hard to claim too much for Augustine’s Confessiones, the first great work of spiritual introspection. At once the crown of antiquity and the foundation of the Middle Ages, Augustine and his “Testimony” (as Wills prefers to translate it) have profoundly shaped the way we understand ourselves, whether or not we live inside the Christian story from which his self-understanding grew. Wills, whose brief biography of Saint Augustine (not reviewed) was published by Viking in 1999, has provided a translation of the first book of the Confessiones, to be followed by translations of three more of the thirteen total. The themes of this deceptively slender volume are various and fascinating: the dialectic of grace and sin in the growing soul; the stages of development from infancy to childhood; the acquisition of speech; the nature of language; the philosophy of education. It’s a rich repast, and, with the guidance Wills supplies through a rhythmically vibrant translation, always sensitive to the nuances of the original Latin, notes on important passages, and a full commentary that grapples with everything from Latin rhetoric and Trinitarian theology to Chomskyan linguistics and Wittgensteinian philosophy, a nourishing one. As an added treat, Wills appends a translation of Augustine’s charming and epistemologically significant dialogue “De Magistro” (“The Teacher”). Wills brings new light to the Latinless and conveys the structural beauty of Augustine’s long sentences (often broken up by translators) as never before. If there is sometimes a price to pay (in the famous first chapter of Book I, for example, where the traditional rendering, “our hearts are restless till they find rest in Thee” becomes “our heart is unstable until stabilized in you”), the gains far outweigh the losses.
One can only hope that Wills will expand his project and give us the Testimony whole.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2001
ISBN: 0-670-03001-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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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