The point being, as Armstrong writes, that tolerance is a sine qua non in a world in which so many people “prefer being...
Prolific religious-studies scholar Armstrong (The Spiral Staircase, 2004, etc.) offers a lively, big-picture treatise in comparative religions, finding similarities more than differences.
Borrowing from the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and with ecumenical good cheer, Armstrong evokes an Axial Age that lasted for about 700 years, from roughly 900 to 200 b.c. During that time came great faiths that “have continued to nourish humanity”: Hinduism and Buddhism from India; Daoism and Confucianism from China; rationalism from Greece; and monotheism from what is now the vicinity of Israel. Armstrong allows that there’s quite a lot of scholarly guesswork attendant in looking into the prehistory of these faiths; in recent years, for instance, it has been determined—for the time being, anyway—that Zoroaster lived centuries before the usually presumed sixth century and that Laozi (Lao Tse), the Daoist philosopher, lived centuries later. Still, there is enough good data to show that each of these worldviews, sometimes independent of each other, sometimes by word of mouth, addressed similar concerns in quite similar ways: Each recognized that suffering is “an inescapable fact of human life,” indeed part of its definition; and each developed a body of doctrine or learned opinion about such core ethical principles as hospitality, empathy and “concern for everybody.” Of course, these big ideas come wrapped in very different packages; though informed by “the Deuteronomists’ passionate insistence on the importance of justice, equity, and compassion,” the ancient Israelites took their instructions from the “one true god,” whereas the Greeks advanced the same sorts of ideas through a panoply of gods and the Buddhists through no god at all.
The point being, as Armstrong writes, that tolerance is a sine qua non in a world in which so many people “prefer being right to being compassionate.” A useful text for an intolerant and uncompassionate time.Pub Date: April 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-41317-0
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2006
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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