An intriguing untangling of a complex theorist, with a Marxist spin.
A new work that seeks to reconcile an academic socialist author with the foundational works of socialism.
Leonard (Legal Studies as Cultural Studies, 1995) here undertakes the ambitious project of re-evaluating and resituating Indian philosopher Spivak’s works in the context of writings by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Lenin and Mao Zedong. Spivak is the author of many Marxist, deconstructionist, feminist and post-colonial works, and Leonard shows her as a figure that represents the Marxist intellectual in capitalist society as a whole. He clearly delineates his position using a 1965 Spivak editorial from the Chinese newspaper Renmin Ribao titled “All Our Work is for the Revolution,” which Leonard edited for inclusion here. He characterizes this editorial as a contribution to the type of socialism outlined in Mao’s writings, and then presents “a careful examination, study, analysis, review, commentary on, and evaluation or ‘hearing’ of the ‘texts’ of Spivak.” In his analysis, he draws on Lenin’s contention that works from a revolutionary society are “infested” by the “miasmas of [capitalism’s] decaying corpse”: “Our problem is therefore not whether this miasma can speak [in Spivak’s writing]—for it can, and it does—but rather what it is, at once, trying to say and trying not to say about the strange relationships at work in the murky depths of…the capitalist system.” This work isn’t an ideal introduction to Spivak, steeped as it is in Leonard’s own interpretations, but it is a valuable text for those interested in an in-depth Marxist/Maoist reading of an author. Leonard’s approach to Spivak is politically and intellectually illuminating, and both author and his subject certainly deserve consideration from the careful reader.
An intriguing untangling of a complex theorist, with a Marxist spin.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490349800
Page Count: 488
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2013
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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