Although there is something here that will interest almost any reader concerned about present-day religion, there’s little...
A senior scholar of religion offers a cautiously optimistic look at the prospects for the spirit at the turn of the millennium.
Many Americans owe their first exposure to the study of comparative religion to Smith; his The World’s Religions (originally The Religions of Man, 1958) is still among the most popular surveys in its field. Smith has had a long and distinguished career, and of late he has joined Joseph Campbell and Mortimer Adler in Bill Moyers’s PBS stable of wise and telegenic oldsters. This present work, written in a relaxed, almost garrulous style, explores what Smith sees as the root of our spiritual crisis: the traditional, spiritual view of humanity and the cosmos has suffered a loss of plausibility under the assaults of modernity (with its scientific cosmology) and a loss of moral authority under the assault of postmodernity’s “fairness revolution.” But modernity and postmodernity have their own problems—they are incapable of satisfying the hunger for meaning that is the strength of the traditional view, nor can they accommodate the spiritual experiences that people will always insist on having. Smith sees our modern/postmodern work as a tunnel, with scientism as its floor, higher education and the law as its walls, and the media as its roof. He finds signs of light at the end of the tunnel, though, in science (which is beginning to sense its limits), in the optimism of the New Age movement (despite its sometimes indiscriminate enthusiasms), and in an increasing skepticism about such icons of modernity as Freud, Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche. Finally, he explores ways of looking at reality that locate the world explored by science within the spiritual world of tradition—wider than science’s cosmos, and far richer in meaning.
Although there is something here that will interest almost any reader concerned about present-day religion, there’s little to satisfy the hearty appetite. Smith’s science is superficial, his social analysis journalistic at best. In the end, you’ll come away without an answer to the question Smith poses in his title.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-067099-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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