An Englishwoman's amused yet sympathetic journey through the New Age culture of the American West. McGrath travels through New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Colorado on a kind of cynic's pilgrimage, to learn about New Age spirituality. On her journey she meets a wide cross-section of the walking wounded: people with remembered past lives, psychics, princesses from lost subterranean cities, damaged inner children, people ``working on themselves.'' Her account makes a fine contribution to the tradition of witty foreign commentary on US culture, and her approach to New Age spirituality—skeptical, with an eye for the hilarious and absurd—is thoroughly entertaining. Some of what she describes is devastating; in a chapter on the New Age appropriation of Native American culture, for instance, McGrath quotes one of her white seekers as saying that the Indians who are addicted to alcohol and gambling aren't really Indians: They're ``reincarnations of 19th-century white men, paying back bad karma. . . . Real Indians are spiritually pure.'' McGrath is a rare phenomenon: a European who can report on American racism and commercial excess without sounding self-righteous. It is not until the final chapter that we learn the extent of her own spiritual despair: that she has been depressed and suicidal throughout her adult life, looking for solace in various kinds of therapy and drugs. This section adds a self-reflectiveness and empathy to her story, making it clear that she identifies with people who are seeking meaning in their lives and that, in some ways, what brought her to the Southwest was not so far from what draws the New Agers. McGrath achieves a balance between mockery and understanding that is rare among commentators on contemporary spirituality.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-14372-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
bookshelf
