L. Ron Hubbard on a skateboard.
Self-proclaimed philosopher and creator of a “genuine world philosophy” Wilber (The Marriage of Sense and Soul, 1998) delivers a talky and tedious so-called novel of ideas to explain a cloying system of categorization, the need for which is never made clear.
Wilber’s main character is a young graduate student named Ken Wilber, who is obsessed with the “fact” that artificial intelligence will exceed human intelligence in about 30 years. But forget plot: this is postmodernism, and what we get is the thinnest sheen of narrative as Ken attends lecture after lecture of busty professorettes who sound as though they are reading excerpts from Wilber’s exhausting explanation of modern society. The strategy seems to be that popularization of New Age sociology can be achieved through personality color-coding: for example, archaics are beige, animists are red, mythics are blue, etc., a notion pounded home repeatedly. The title comes from the supposition that the baby boomer generation displays a good deal of narcissism. In making the accusation, it can be argued, Wilber engages in a good bit of the same himself, and seemingly the best justification he dredges up for all the hyper-jargon and semi-technical tongue-twisters here comes in eighth-grade double-entendres delivered in bold script through Chloe, a faceless nympho vixen who reminds us that, in the end, thinking is no fun unless there’s sex involved. The story provides excuses for professors to say things like “But in order to move into second tier, the fixation to pluralism and the green meme in general needs to be relaxed” and for Chloe to say things like “If we live 200,000 years, you and I will be able to make love at least a billion times.” But the more important agenda is the hodge-podge and ongoing survey of recent postmodern scholarship and goofy New Age brain-teasers examined through the paradigm of an inescapably wacky pseudo-philosophy.
L. Ron Hubbard on a skateboard.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-57062-801-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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