A difficult work with provocative ideas hidden in the rough.
Mauser tackles the great truths in his debut philosophy manifesto.
Here is a work meant to stir creativity in the reader, to unshackle him or her from the bonds of stale thought and to unleash the latent producer within. Mauser believes in philosophy with an application: truth is valuable in that it leads to action. In 115 psalmlike sections, he offers his quick yet comprehensive thoughts on topics such as courage, venture capital and life extension. There are many intriguing subjects, and the work is admirably thorough as far as variety of concepts. Part self-help guide, part modern business model, the book offers a wide, autodidactic field of interests. Furthermore, it does so without coming off as scattershot: There’s logical structure to Mauser’s argument as he builds from one idea to the next, attempting to strip away the blockages in the reader’s mind and replace them with a more open sense of determination. With nods to thinkers as disparate as Friedrich Nietzsche, Peter Thiel and Wayne Gretzky, Mauser launches the reader through a discussion on the origins of religion, the nature of free will, the best methods of creativity, and production strategies for being a maker in the 21st century. Unfortunately, semantic clarity isn’t one of the book’s strengths. Mauser is so bent on defining and redefining words, often in the most abstract sense, that any reader who isn’t a normal consumer of dense, rhetorical philosophy will likely get lost around the second page. “Explaining,” for instance, “is merely the process of, first, connecting neurons on the hierarchical layer of ‘syntax’ to define ‘language’ and conceptual ‘words’ for abstract objects, and second, one level up, on the semantic layer of abstraction, to put those concepts into ‘sentences’ that have meaning when received by another human being in communication.” Early on, Mauser relieves himself of responsibility to his less informed readers: “only authentic books, only books written for the author, only books that write themselves, only books that are pieces of art—exclusively—are valuable books, are the books worth writing, and the books worth reading.” Don’t get it? Well, he says, that’s on you. A young man at the beginning of his career, Mauser has philosophical merits that may be sound, but one hopes his future books will take more seriously the writer’s important chore—elucidation.
A difficult work with provocative ideas hidden in the rough.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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