Not quite fit for the classroom, but a fun romp nonetheless.
A teenaged boy is encouraged to start thinking big in this playful philosophy primer.
Old thinkers never die—they just wind up in the World of Ideas, a sort of limbo where they’re free to while away the hours debating matters of morality and identity. Among the most prominent residents there are Socrates and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who’ve made a wager that Socrates can’t help an average person make philosophy a useful part of life. Their unwitting guinea pig is Ben Warner, a 15-year-old who’s more concerned with his next soccer match, figuring out girls and avoiding his boss’s wrath at the fish-and-chips shop where he works. But he’s intrigued enough by his attractive guide—Socrates’ secretary, Lila—to begin making regular visits to the World of Ideas. (The towel closet in his house is a portal.) There, he meets pairs of people who take conflicting sides on philosophy’s key questions: Can you trust what your senses tell you? Are right and wrong absolute or relative? What is happiness? Is there such a thing as free will? The arguments usually aren’t attached to specific philosophers or points in history, which makes the novel only moderately useful as a textbook. Indeed, philosophy’s big names appear only briefly or in comedic contexts; John Donne and Emmanuel Kant make cameo appearances, Wittgenstein has an odd fixation on welding, and Aristotle is apparently nursing a crush on Simone de Beauvoir. Between the line drawings interspersed throughout and the lightly didactic tone, this is best approached as a sort of adult version of The Phantom Tollbooth, not a successor to Jostein Gaarder’s more sophisticated Sophie’s World. But Eyre has a great talent for injecting humor into dialogue, which keeps the debates entertaining while retaining their intellectual rigor; the arguments bounce back and forth rapidly, and Ben’s engaged responses reflect the reader’s own.
Not quite fit for the classroom, but a fun romp nonetheless.Pub Date: March 6, 2007
ISBN: 1-59691-300-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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