This exploration of the roots of violence in human society finds a villain in biology: not in the genetic urge that drives each organism to reproduce, but in the forces that create larger "superorganisms" that seek to perpetuate themselves. Bloom (whose credentials range from cancer research at Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute to experimental graphics, programmed learning, and founding a public relations firm that represented many well-known rock artists) draws on an impressive range of historical, anthropological, and biological research to support his thesis. (The 333 pages of text are followed by an additional 117 pages of notes and bibliography.) From this massive body of material, he arrives at a conclusion that such philosophers as Hobbes would find congenial: Aggression is not an aberrant force in society, but its very foundation. From Caesar to Khomeini, Bloom finds that those who have lead great nations are propagators of memes—the core bodies of a culture's key ideas that are the ideological equivalent of genes. History is not so much the contest of armies as of memes, and a strong meme drives out the weak as surely as the genes of an alpha male in a chimpanzee herd dominate those of his lesser competitors. While Bloom often gives cogent analyses of the currents of history, his thesis has an unfortunate potential for being warped to the service of chauvinism and racism. His attempts to draw lessons for the future (with comments on the predatory nature of Muslim society or the inability of African nations to transcend their tribal memes) are dubious at best, and potentially inflammatory at worst. And his ideas are often developed more by example than by exploration of their deeper consequences. Bloom's basic thesis is thought-provoking and often full of valuable insight; it is unfortunate that the implications he derives from it are so likely to encourage the worst aspects of human nature to come to the fore.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-532-9
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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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