Authentic, accessible prose mixed with real insight.
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Wouk (A Hole in Texas, 2004, etc.) tackles calculus, the Talmud and cranky, cantankerous physicists in a poignant examination of science and religion.
In a crowded book market filled with self-serving and redundant theories about humankind’s place in the grand scheme, it is rare to encounter an original, honest, charming voice. Such is the case with Wouk’s latest work. The author’s journey began with an innocent but daunting challenge from the great Cal Tech physicist Richard Feynman, who, during one of their discussions of quantum mechanics, asked Wouk if he knew calculus. Wouk admitted that he did not. “You had better learn it,” Feynman replied. “It’s the language God talks.” What followed was an earnest search to master said language in an effort to grapple with the all-to-human desire to better understand existence. During his search, Wouk discovered that God is in fact bilingual. His second language is one the author, and other mere mortals who flunked calculus, have more than a passing knowledge of—the language of faith. Be it Judaism, Christianity or any other religion, Wouk demonstrates that the divide between science and religion can be crossed, and one doesn’t need a Nobel Prize to do it. However, there are no guarantees that you will find answers once you cross the chasm. To say that it’s the journey and not the destination that matters would be to understate the profound respect and awe the author shows for all those engaged in the search for life’s big answers, whichever language they speak. Wouk’s humility, humor and insight make the book a joy to read and a wonder to contemplate. What the book lacks in pages, it makes up for in soul.
Authentic, accessible prose mixed with real insight.Pub Date: April 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-07845-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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