A plodding look at the many views of this enduring moralist.
A determined yet not exactly fresh look at this “hopelessly authoritarian, misogynistic, and conservative” sage, whose ideas have nonetheless endured and thrived in East Asia.
Time journalist Schuman (The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth, 2009) finds plenty of intriguing contradictions in the ideas of Confucius (551-479 B.C.), which were largely spread by his ardent followers in the fragmented Analects and other works. The primacy of education, the uses of meritocracy, the sanctity of the filial bond, the subservience of women, the harmonizing sense of knowing one’s place in society—these are some of the salient Confucian tenets. Schuman is not a scholar, and while he infuses his work with historical research, he remains rooted in the present day, seeking clues as to why Confucian ideas were both excoriated by the Chinese (during Mao Zedong’s era) and rehabilitated as a useful ploy for increasing productivity and prosperity in the workforce (since Deng Xiaoping’s era). To reflect the diversity of reception to Confucius’ ideas over the ages, the author divides his chapters by facets through which to view the enigmatic moralist: Confucius the Man, Confucius the Oppressor, Confucius the Businessman and so on. In his own time of squabbling kingdoms, Confucius proposed a revolutionary way of nation-building—not by armies but by benevolence. In language that is often dull and consistently injected with business terminology, Schuman looks at the spread of the sage’s ideas through East Asia, especially the adoption of his teachings by the Han political leadership. Yet by the 19th century, a once-great China had fallen well behind the West. Moreover, while the Communists executed a thorough rejection of Confucian ideas, the modern regimes of China, Singapore and others are keen to resurrect Confucian ideas for economic management.
A plodding look at the many views of this enduring moralist.Pub Date: March 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-465-02551-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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