Peck's latest offering is the final installment of his ``Road Less Traveled'' trilogy (The Road Less Traveled, 1978, Further Along the Road Less Traveled, 1993) and a synthesis of his thinking to date. Is there a link between personal growth, spirituality, and basic mental health? Peck has spent much of his adult life arguing that such a link exists and struggling with the more difficult task of describing it. In this new work he focuses not on health but on its absence, asserting that many forms of human evil can be traced to a failure to face up to the challenge of thinking for ourselves. Confronted by life's complexities, we fall back on stereotypes in the way that we see things and treat each other. Peck goes on to argue that we must cultivate the ability to think clearly, as well as a healthy love of self (and an awareness of our own mortality), if we are not to be swept up in damaging group-driven behavior. He criticizes the denial of God and the human soul in many circles, not least by psychiatrists and the helping professions generally, as instances of simplistic thinking. As in The Road Less Traveled, Peck warns that, contrary to what our culture tells us, difficulty and pain are unavoidable ingredients of the process of personal growth. However, he now believes that his earlier stance in favor of traditional American individualism needs to be amplified by an awareness of our common interdependence and the notion of community. Peck speaks from his own personal and professional experience as a psychiatrist. This gives his writing a powerful existential quality; yet together with his habit of frequently quoting from his own books, it sometimes makes him sound pompous, as if he alone has honestly wrestled with the perennial philosophical and theological issues he raises. Generally balanced, though, and challenging; sure to appeal to Peck's large following. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-81314-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996
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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