A lucid entertainment for the humanists in the audience.
The world is shaped by books, and human history by texts sacred and profane: so this thoughtful treatise by the general editor of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.
“Literature isn’t just for book lovers,” writes Puchner (English and Comparative Literature/Harvard Univ.; The Drama of Ideas: Platonic Provocations in Theater and Philosophy, 2010, etc.), after opening with a thesis that isn’t quite novel but bears thinking about nonetheless: we gain much of our sense of history, morality, ethics, and religion through works of the imagination. Thus it’s no surprise that the astronauts who landed on the moon in 1969 couched their expressions of wonder in the words of the Bible or that Alexander the Great patterned his wars against the backdrop of the Homeric epics (“he wanted to meet Darius in a traditional battle and defeat him in single combat, the way Achilles had met and defeated Hector”). Sometimes, Puchner wanders into gods-for-clods territory, and his take is a little old-fashioned in its mistrust of technology and hints of disdain for mass culture of the Harry Potter variety; still, it’s all to the greater good of recognizing the significance of literature and its study. The book provides a nice collection of oddments of the bibliophilic nature, fitting neatly alongside works by Nicholas Basbanes and Alberto Manguel: it’s illuminating to know that the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal was once an accountant and “realized that his store of knowledge was useful only if it was organized,” giving birth to the world’s first known scheme of library classification; it’s also well to recognize that we know so much more about the Heian court of medieval Japan than about almost any other government of the time thanks to The Tale of Genji. In mounting a learned and, yes, literate defense for literature as an instrument of mind and memory, Puchner also argues against literary fundamentalism, allowing texts to be seen as living things and allowing “readers of each generation to make these texts their own.”
A lucid entertainment for the humanists in the audience.Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9893-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
