A timely manifesto for a misunderstood and maligned school of thought.
A passionate introduction to the philosophy of humanism.
We are living in a time when nearly one billion people worldwide claim to be nonreligious, writes Harvard University humanist chaplain Epstein. Even in the United States, one of the most religious of industrialized nations, some 40 million say no to belief in supernatural causality. So now is the time, writes the author, for a rallying cry in the name of humanism, a philosophy built on the idea of being good without a god. In his first book, Epstein recalls the long history of doubt, going back to Epicurus and Socrates, re-emerging in the Enlightenment and then again during the age of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche. Epstein successfully dispels the case that God is required if one is to be good. “This is not a book about whether one can be good without God because that question does not need to be answered—it needs to be rejected outright,” writes the author. “To suggest that that one can’t be good without belief in a god is not just an opinion, a mere curious musing. It is prejudice. It may even be discrimination.” Socrates was the first to ask whether something is good because God loves it or if God loves it because it's good? If it's the latter, then logically speaking there's no need for God. More important, Epstein's convivial argument gets beyond the hairsplitting, condescension and animosity of so-called New Atheists like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris to arrive at a constructive ideology that explains why it's important to be good even without the presence of the Almighty, and how to do it. Though the author’s prose isn't as clear as his thinking, he offers an effective primer on humanism, especially for young seekers.
A timely manifesto for a misunderstood and maligned school of thought.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-167011-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
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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