An inspiration for those in need of words to carry on with life.
The noted academic and former politician examines the nature of consolation as a means of helping us accept the tragic reality of our lives.
“Consolation is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other’s suffering or seek to bear our own,” writes Ignatieff. “What we are searching for is how to go on, how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living.” The author is generous in providing cases in point. Foremost is Job, the biblical figure whom God tested with exquisitely awful punishments. The great lesson of Job, Ignatieff suggests, is not that he eventually bows to his tormentors, but that he teaches us to “refuse the false consolations of those who deny what we have endured.” The author then turns to the Psalms, which “have enabled men and women in pain, throughout the ages, to grasp the commonality of their experience.” Both Job and the Psalms, he adds, give us the language to express our hurt. Cicero may not have been the greatest model of probity, but the Roman philosopher adds to that literature, as does Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, whom Ignatieff credits with setting a noble example: “For it is consoling to know that not even an emperor can get through the night, alone with his thoughts. That is something we can share with him.” Montaigne turned to his thoughts, alone in his tower, in the face of a terrible religious civil war that had lasted for 30 years. Having witnessed the peasants in the countryside around him prepare for their plague-borne deaths by digging their own graves and awaiting the end, he found consolation for his impending demise. Marx and Lincoln also figure in these pages, as does Cicely Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement. Ignatieff concludes that consolation is a species of grace, which makes the consoler an angel in disguise.
An inspiration for those in need of words to carry on with life.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8050-5521-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
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The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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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