An illuminating celebration of enveloping moments of being.
The author aims “not to chase mood, track it, or pin it down” but rather to “listen for it.”
In these captivating essays, which meld memoir, philosophical meditations, and reports from excursions far, deeply interior, and wide, Cappello (English and Creative Writing/Univ. of Rhode Island; Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them, 2010, etc.) explores the abstract, amorphous notion of mood: “a jagged conjunction of a furred creature of a feeling” that, she cautions, “cannot be explained.” Because moods are “personal and quirky,” Cappello ranges freely as she considers how moods are experienced, evoked, and changed. As a child, she noticed her father’s “perpetual mood,” which was sour, tortured, anxious: in a word, “lousy.” Happily for her, she did not inherit his predilection, but she notes her own variable moods, depending on what she is doing (looking through a View-Master, for example, whose “scenes invite the hue of some broken-off part of a mood”), hearing (sound and silence feature significantly in many essays), or reading (the picture books, for example, of Margaret Wise Brown). Cappello discovers in Brown’s Quiet Noisy Book a passage that seems to her the perfect definition of mood: “the sound of a person about to think.” Cappello also responds, moodily, to where she is, taking readers on a long, digressive journey to the L.C. Bates Museum in Maine, a crazy house of taxidermy, Orientalist esoterica, circus-model miniatures, ivory busts of famous figures, and assorted, seemingly valuable porcelain. “The world is out of joint and yet all the world’s conjoined, the carefully documented mishmash seems to say,” and it generated for her “a mood of madcap,” in stark contrast to the “mood of reverence that is the result of decorum, protocol, convention,” such as that found in a church. Cappello’s fresh inquisitiveness and surprising trains of thought may well remind readers of the ruminative writings of Adam Phillips or Alain de Botton.
An illuminating celebration of enveloping moments of being.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-226-35606-8
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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
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
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