A fascinating combination of a sometimes poetic ``love song'' to and a crisp structural analysis of Judaism's magnum opus, the Babylonian Talmud. The metaphor of music may initially seem inappropriate for the verbal, intellectual, and argumentative Talmud, which the author describes as ``so elliptical, so self-referential that its rules of thought require explanation that the writing does not convey.'' But Neusner (Religious Studies/Univ. of South Florida, Tampa; A Rabbi Talks with Jesus, 1993, etc.), by far the most prolific scholar of rabbinic Judaism, succeeds in demonstrating the Talmud's distinctive ``melody.'' In part, he does so by differentiating it from the Pentateuch, which is characterized by narrative and ritual commandments, while the Talmud revels in polemical dialectics. Referring to specific talmudic passages, Neusner demonstrates how the student of Talmud, like the musician facing a score, is presented with a skeletal ``melody'' that he—and, increasingly, she—then co-creates with the ``composer'' by relearning and reinterpreting it. Somewhat less convincingly, Neusner maintains that this hermeneutic is purposeful because it helps the learner apprehend ever-higher realms of rationality and harmony. In his view, the Talmud's logic and law stand revealed as but one facet of the universe's divinely inspired harmony. In a typically beautifully succinct formulation, Neusner writes that ``what we learn about God [in the Talmud] is that what we dispute is beyond dispute.'' Yet what, one wonders, of evidence of divine absence, of human evil, and natural destructiveness? These are, after all, matters both the Pentateuch and the Talmud address repeatedly and, wisely, avoid resolving. Neusner may wax a bit too rhapsodic at times, as lovers are wont to do. But despite minor flaws, he writes with the kind of balance between imaginative daring and explicatory clarity that has become academia's rarest commodity.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-226-57648-5
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
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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