A collection of sayings and observations on the nature of peace and paradise as both a destination and a state of mind.
Vernon’s short nonfiction debut consists of seven “Note books” full of apparently random, koanlike utterances covering various conceptions of inner peace, personal enlightenment and, above all, the nature of paradise, which Vernon only sporadically links with any kind of organized religion or codified afterlife. (Christianity is mentioned more often than any other denomination but never dogmatically.) Rather, he seems to conceive paradise as an internal state of mind, a calmness of the heart, a thing to have rather than a place to go. Several of Vernon’s tips are fairly straightforward New-Age spiritualism: “Have a more humanised culture. Be enchanted. Be easy not attempting control. Aim to become carefree.” His approach is nonjudgmental and stress-free, accentuating serenity over striving: “Paradise doesn’t need a Christ to prepare a place for us,” he writes. The impact of these simple, encouraging messages is significantly blunted, however, by the presence of a great many head-scratchingly impenetrable pronouncements: e.g., “Infinity, if it exists has no end to finiteness,” or “The appropriate description of pleasure is pleasure,” or “An infinite description perhaps goes past infinity in reasonable knowledge.” Beyond such weird utterances, there are many portions of Vernon’s book that slip from being strange to simply garbled: “More pleasure than otherwise is not a larger total, which is infinite, but larger during infinity, which is better”; or “The bible (sic) is not very high. Just good appears better and better,” and so on. A strong edit would eliminate these bizarre malapropisms, but as the text stands, readers may spend as much time striving to understand the text as they do trying to reach enlightenment.
An occasionally insightful but extremely uneven exposition of inner serenity.
Pub Date: March 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1497324961
Page Count: 136
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2015
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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