Lapham (Hotel America, 1995, etc.), adept cosmopolite, elegant essayist, and longtime Harper’s editor, provides a high-class self-helper appropriate to our times” contemporaneously Menckenite, sardonic, and withering. In a felicitous introductory essay—one that is destined, if there is any literary justice, to be anthologized widely—Lapham deconstructs Horatio Alger to reveal the hero’s true nature as sycophant. He expands on the pervasive “courtier spirit” that infects society, with acolyte tycoons “bowing and smiling in eight or nine different directions, forever turning, like a compass needle or a weather vane, into the wind of new money.” Then, usually in a couple of effective paragraphs, he advises careerists on the make, like an observant Dutch uncle. He offers sage counsel on more or less a hundred important topics from Appearances (“promote the impression that you are very busy, never out of touch with Rupert Murdoch or Michael Eisner”) and Adultery (“in some social circles . . . it is still considered polite to seduce the person next to whom one finds oneself seated at dinner,” but, he suggests, exchange business cards first) to Gravitas (“think of yourself as a speech by Alan Greenspan or a trunk by Louis Vuitton”) and Wit (“nearly always ill-advised”). The brief, epigrammatic homilies, pithy as Proverbs, are clearly words to the wise guys at the close of a particularly unwise century. Lapham assumes the stance of a latter-day Lord Chesterfield, a modern Ben Franklin, a ’90s Dale Carnegie. For some, unaccustomed to the study of the upper echelons or without the requisite amour propre, the hilarity may seem below current slapstick standards. But for those anxious to insinuate themselves into the privileged class and for those who care about American cultural sociology, here is a perceptive and funny critique. Lapham has a pointed wit, and he applies it surgically to contemporary society. He’s written a pleasing little book just in time for the eager graduates, class of ’99. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-42605-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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