A book that offers an effective argument against the pseudoscience of intelligent design from an unusual point of view.
A primer on biblical and scientific theories of the creation of the universe.
Robinson has a unique vantage point on the controversy regarding the origin of life: he once taught science at a school in Norris, Tennessee, just 70 miles from where another teacher, John Scopes, was fined by a court in 1925 for teaching the theory of evolution. When students asked Robinson about the topic, he had to avoid saying anything that might violate Tennessee’s anti-evolution law, which was enacted in 1925 and only repealed in 1967. In that state, the controversy is still very much alive—a newer law, for example, allows teachers to debate creationism and evolution side by side in a science classroom. In this extended essay, Robinson provides a useful overview of the “current evidence pertaining to both ways that could have been used in Creation” so that members of the current generation of American youth “might decide for themselves.” He presents the biblical evidence for creationism—the first chapter of Genesis, he says, “should be appropriately recognized for...providing answers that have satisfied the concerns of millions of people”—alongside the science of natural laws that underlies evolution. He notes that the Big Bang theory, which postulates that the universe originated with a cosmic explosion of extremely compact matter, “fails to address the fundamental question: Where did all of the compact matter come from?” Overall, the author should be commended for the clarity of his explanations. However, he says little to advance the debate in any particular way. Readers may find his included “background of essay,” “The Evolution of Anti-Evolution in Public School Science Classes,” more enlightening. In 2005, a federal judge ruled that the theory of intelligent design was a religious belief, similar to creationism, so it couldn’t be taught in public schools as being science-based. Robinson engagingly argues that intelligent-design advocates have attempted to undermine that ruling by invoking academic freedom. The “crusade to ‘protect’ teachers from reprisal for expressing their opinion or engaging in the study, debate or discussion of Intelligent Design in public school classes,” he writes, “is a contrived fallacy.”
A book that offers an effective argument against the pseudoscience of intelligent design from an unusual point of view.Pub Date: March 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0578118611
Page Count: 110
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 6, 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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