A generous, if occasionally overstuffed, investigation of time, literature, and the nature of the Godhead.
A Shakespeare-tinged philosophical inquiry into life, the universe, and everything.
In this sprawling new book, Driscoll, the author of Shakespeare’s Identities (2019), explores “the intersections of psychology, philosophy, religion, and literature” in the writings of William Shakespeare, Carl Jung, Alfred North Whitehead, and a broad spectrum of other thinkers and authors. Undergirding most of these observations is the author’s conception of the Judeo-Christian God, which, according to him, has five manifestations: the individual conception; the tribal conception; the “civilizational Godhead,” created when a society projects archetypes, of a type described by Jung, onto what Driscoll calls “Actual God”; nature, which the author refers to as “Gaia, the ruling deity of the earthly biosphere”; and finally, “Actual God,” “the controlling forces and principles of the universe.” The author elides the question of the existence of God to launch into a broader discussion of Jung’s response—that the archetypal conception of the Deity is a fixture of the collective psyche. Driscoll links this notion to the nature of time and concludes that “we need look no further than time itself for find [sic] the God of the universe.” Driscoll, citing Whitehead, notes that this God operates in time as a “value creator”: “creativity is this God's defining activity and character.” The author’s various meditations on God and time lead him to the plays of Shakespeare, which he cites throughout the book. He alludes equally to the writings of Jung—particularly his idea of synchronicity, signaled by “meaningful coincidence[s] between external events and states in a perceiver’s psyche,” as when “someone dreams of a tiger and the next day encounters an actual tiger.”
Several larger and more pointed philosophical questions undergird many of Driscoll's meditations, and the most intriguing of them are his speculations regarding the emergence of a new, grand religious concept: “Is the center that cannot hold the unbalanced, orthodox Trinitarian Godhead or the vaunted omnipotence of the Islamic ego-god or both?” he asks. “Is the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem a new revelation of Godhead?” Over the course of this book, the author has an easy command of his wide array of authors, and the unpredictability and the richness of the connections that he draws are consistently engaging. Readers who enjoy religious and philosophical speculation will find a bumper crop in these pages, as Driscoll doesn’t hesitate to attack some of the more familiar questions about the meaning of life and essential characteristics of religion. Skeptical readers, however, are likely to feel the urge to interrupt their reading due to the book’s ungrounded claims, far-reaching assumptions, and assertions that are wide open to challenge; for instance, Driscoll writes at one point, “Time cycles of creation and destruction give rise to value which, much like consciousness, resembles an epiphenomenon, or, if you will, a psychic phenomenon.” Still, the author is charismatic and confident on the page, which makes for an easygoing reading experience—one that is only mildly disturbed by moments of overconfidence such as these.
A generous, if occasionally overstuffed, investigation of time, literature, and the nature of the Godhead.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68053-481-8
Page Count: 393
Publisher: Academica Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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