An inviting introduction to modern cosmology and philosophy with no prerequisites other than the willingness to entertain...
A vade mecum for head-scratchers by the multifaceted Frayn (The Copenhagen Papers, 2001, etc.), whose philosophical concerns are notably many and well attested in his body of work.
Humans were born to gaze at the stars and wonder, and when we do, most of us tend to be humbled by the vastness of the universe. But humans shouldn’t be daunted, counsels Frayn; instead, we should take courage from the fact that “the world has no form or substance without you and me to provide them, and you and I have no form or substance without the world to provide them in its turn.” The technical complexities of the Bishop Berkeley/tree-falling-in-the-forest argument and its counters are legion, but Frayn does a very nice job of adumbrating, observing along the way such legendary trip-ups as the principle of uncertainty and observational distortion and revisiting the questions that used to keep college students awake at night: How do we know that we know? Do we ever really make decisions? Why do we say that there’s a present when the present is already the past? Why is it that “the conscious subject that gives meaning to the objective universe cannot give meaning to itself”? Frayn takes clear pleasure in considering questions that make the heads of lesser mortals spin and pulsate, and he takes leisurely detours that sometimes lead to the neat destruction of philosophical positions and schools of thought; his dismantling of Chomskyan transformational grammar, for instance, is a masterpiece of gentle subversion, in keeping with Frayn’s overall playful and user-friendly approach. He spins out some nice apothegms, too: “The decisiveness of decisions is as elusive as the decisions themselves. It recedes like the intentionality of intention.” Indeed, and though the universe may spin merrily along without us, it requires us to interpret it—or, if nothing else, finds it congenial that we do so.
An inviting introduction to modern cosmology and philosophy with no prerequisites other than the willingness to entertain counterfactuals, imponderables and leaps of faith. Nicely done.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2007
ISBN: 0-8050-8148-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 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
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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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