A calm, spiritual call to a faith “for all humans, for the world, and for all times.”
Inspired by his reading of Punjabi mystic poets, Ghulam, in his debut work of nonfiction, takes the broadest possible deistic approach to personal spirituality.
The author describes an ultimate divine source underlying all the religious faiths of the world. “The God of the universe,” Ghulam writes, “is not God of any particular faith, race, or group of people, claiming any sort of superiority over others.” Neither is this God a creature of trappings; he “prefers neither the designs of prayer buildings nor the days or times of worship,” Ghulam notes in a typically eloquent passage. “He needs neither the meat of the sacrifices nor the hunger of the fasts, if these do not evoke love and mercy.” Love and mercy are central to this benign concept of a supreme being; Ghulam roundly denies divine complicity in human atrocities throughout the ages, which have been caused by entirely human traits such as “obstinacy, irrationality, greed, and pride of power.” According to Ghulam, God is beyond all such pettiness, accessible to any “free mind” who seeks enlightenment. Ghulam himself wishes everyone their own liberties, based on “equality and justice” (this equality doesn’t extend to the rest of the animals on Earth, who, the author believes, “have no values, so these were created to serve humans”). The author goes into great detail when describing his concept of a God free of the taint of human conflict. He points to “fighting between Pakistan and India, Palestine and Israel, or mujahedeen and Russians in Afghanistan,” stressing that these tragedies were born of human foibles, without divine prompting or sanction. In a handful of elegantly reasoned chapters, he reduces the bewildering multiplicity of conflicting human faiths to a simple series of spiritual precepts, keeping his focus on compassion and charity.
A calm, spiritual call to a faith “for all humans, for the world, and for all times.”Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1475964592
Page Count: 192
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2015
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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