Challenging, humanist ruminations on time.
Psychologist Raymond presents a stimulating look into the many expressions of time, offering a critique of its unbridled power over our lives in the United States.
“Isn’t there more to being human than performing some act, or behaving in some proscribed fashion, just to be ‘on’ time?” asks Raymond. He suggests that Americans march to a sense of cultural time–our system of social regulation; a commodity to be spent, borrowed, saved, given, lent; a measure of progress–that is not serving us well. And cultural time is our intolerant obsession: “Yet we will all pay the price for the limitations of human experience which are socially-agreed upon by the very definition of cultural time,” which may find expression in squelching individual spirituality, or the folly of punishing children who don’t perform to our arbitrary expectations of achievement by a specific age. As the global reach of America reaches unprecedented heights, conflicts with other notions of cultural time will become increasingly nettlesome and likely violent, the author avers. Further, other concepts of time–be they objective, internal, natural, social, biological or digital–bring different rhythms and values to the table of life. Raymond explores each of these modes of time, through space and over time, as it were, detailing their roles as makers of order; as such, time is the special play-thing of science. Western science, he writes, mirrors time in that it “deepen[s] our knowledge into specific and specialized areas” at the expense of “broadening our experience as human beings.” Science, says the author, with its reliance on one method, constricts our inquiry into knowledge, our ways of knowing. Raymond’s ideas come at the reader in short, energetic paragraphs–“tiny pinholes of light,” he says–that, while occasionally scattered, are easily digestible.
Challenging, humanist ruminations on time.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2006
ISBN: 978-0-595-41191-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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