An intriguing book about the continuing evolution of civilization.
Solayappan searches for an ethical center of modernity in this debut work of philosophy.
The modern world came into being around A.D. 1500, when economic and technological developments in Europe caused the West to advance at an accelerated pace from the rest of the world. Prior to that time, the globe’s major pre-modern civilizations existed at more or less the same level of maturity. The four philosophies that provided them with their traditions— Confucian, Indian, Islamic, and Christian—had been “perfect and ethical in their inception,” though each had then “degenerated fairly soon.” The major philosophical engines of the modern world—European Enlightenment values, Marxism—have been based in pragmatism rather than morality. In searching for an ethical modernity, Solayappan focuses his attention on the Indian independence movement. “With the advent of modernity,” the author writes, “it was only in India, during the first half of the 20th century, that a discourse on ethics was carried out in the public sphere.” In the cauldron of modern colonialism, Solayappan explores how an ethical movement fared in the modern world and traces its ramifications for the nature of truth and the chances for a peaceful world. The author has a natural, professorial prose style and is adept at organizing huge swaths of history and human experience into easily digestible concepts. While his thesis is never fully apparent (even by the book’s end), his ruminations are compelling enough to keep the reader more or less content to follow his train of thought. His prescriptions for how to create a more ethical world are as attractive as they are impractical (“America needs to do three things to transform its capitalist system overnight into an ethical system”), but the book succeeds as a work of imaginative thinking as opposed to a manual for immediate change. Solayappan asks the reader to question the way that things are, to consider how they have been, and to always remember that this moment—though one of great fluctuation —is but a brief one in the long history of human self-improvement.
An intriguing book about the continuing evolution of civilization.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-692-02804-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: Sai Publishers
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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