Enthusiastic but lackluster travel writing.
An English journalist’s account of his three-month summer walking tour of Great Britain.
For Hayden (You Kant Make It Up!: Strange Ideas from History's Great Philosophers, 2011), walking had always been “a rather dull affair.” But when his wife, Wendy, proposed that they do the “End-to-End,” a walkabout that extended from the northeastern tip of Scotland to the southwestern tip of England, he could not resist the physical challenge. The two set off from John o’Groats, which had won an award in 2010 as “Scotland’s most dismal town.” The journey got off to a difficult start, with Hayden and Wendy forced to use the tarmacked roads they had wanted to avoid. Suffering from frequent foot and body soreness, the author soon found his thoughts turning to philosophy. During the boring, rainy days on the trek to Inverness, for example, a brooding Hayden recalled Bertrand Russell’s observations that “external interests are key to happiness.” As the footpaths of the beautiful Scottish Highlands opened to them, the mood lightened. Hayden’s thoughts turned to Epicurus, who believed that the simple things—such as biscuits and coffee after a hard day’s walk—often brought the most intense pleasures. The “pitfalls and privations” of the magnificent Pennine Way followed, which led Hayden to contemplate Viktor Frankl’s idea that it was struggle for a worthy cause that made life meaningful. Through wind and fog, sun and rain, the pair traveled such celebrated routes as the Heart of England and Cotswold Ways, where they encountered “woodland and pasture…ploughed fields…and ancient town[s] with enchanting Tudor cottages.” Unfortunately, the author’s descriptions of these and other treasures he encountered on the way are pedestrian and perfunctory. Observing Hayden relearning how to delight in “simply being” may offer satisfaction for some readers, but the overall narrative comes across as trite and unoriginal.
Enthusiastic but lackluster travel writing.Pub Date: July 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-656-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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