by Kim Chernin ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 31, 1996
This exploration of spirituality via a look back at dad and the experience of easing a friend into death is right in sync with new directions in the self-help field. A prolific writer, Chernin (A Different Kind of Listening, 1994, etc.) is also a psychoanalyst who early in her career grabbed onto issues like body image, eroticism, bisexuality, and women's relationships with their mothers; her explorations of them brought her a dedicated audience. This small book uses her memories of her quiet and thoughtful father (as opposed to her noisy and assertive mother, whom she wrote about in In My Mother's House) as a springboard to reflections on the Meaning of Life. Her belief that ``we live in a universe built fundamentally upon spiritual values'' is not, she says, ``a fashionable idea,'' although, in fact, its current trendiness quotient is up there with those of Donna Karan and Web sites. Divided into three parts, Chernin's journey begins with a reminiscence of Saturday walks with her father, of his love for his garden, and of his ``small acts of kindness and concern,'' which may have had as much impact on her dreams of a socialist future as her mother's larger and more public efforts at political change. Next is a story of a woman dying of cancer. Chernin's efforts to help- -including a promise of assisted suicide, if necessary, and episodes of energy transfer from therapist to patient—led to a new agenda for the author, a desire to work with the dying. Third is the lure of a ``divine mother,'' a Hindu woman distributing her blessings in a small town in Germany. After a visit to Mother Meera, Chernin returns to her California home inspired to reconcile her legacies of political activism and spirituality. Perhaps enough spiritual sustenance for her but not enough for the reader. Tillers of spiritual soil need to dig much deeper than the author does here.
Pub Date: July 31, 1996
ISBN: 1-56512-100-7
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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by Robert Greene ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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