A learned, bold journey to the limits of human perception and beyond.
Kazden offers a mind-expanding debut novel about a symposium examining the core concepts of the universe.
Imagine if great minds from across the ages could congregate in one room to discuss their understandings of time and reality. In this ambitious work, Socrates, Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, among others, come together to do just that. To befit the nature of the symposium as a great Hellenic institution, the author gives each of the characters Greek names. Einstein is called “Miapetra,” meaning “one stone,” Hawking is referred to as “Geraki” or “hawk,” whereas Isaac Newton is “Neatono” or “new ton.” The men meet at Neatono’s house, where they begin a discussion about relativity theory, specifically how the past, present, and future are relative. The author’s use of Socratic questioning proves to be a gentle introduction to complex ideas, particularly for the uninitiated. Yet readers may still benefit from prior knowledge of quantum mechanics to truly grasp this discussion. The explorations of how perceptions of reality vary among individuals are particularly fascinating: “So two individuals of the same species with sensory equipment of unequal quality will experience differently the same reality, to all intents and purposes, would you agree?” The book introduces two new definitions: antIs, “the human observer’s experience of reality and the universe,” and totIs, “which defines a total reality of the universe unavailable to [a] human observer’s created antIs reality.” The arguments are dazzlingly convincing, although there’s a certain arrogance in reanimating the world’s greatest thinkers simply to have them concur with one’s main thesis. However, the book is not without a wry humor—Max Planck talks of switching to a gluten-free diet and Newton speaks of getting his cataracts removed. Purists may contest the probability of each word the author drops into the mouths of these great men, but this controversy is part and parcel of this brilliantly daring piece of work.
A learned, bold journey to the limits of human perception and beyond.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5152-0354-4
Page Count: 106
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PROFILES
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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