Intriguing, though the message is decidedly mixed.
Journalist Riley examines some US institutions of higher learning with a religious bent, wondering whether their students will have more social impact in post-collegiate professions than those from worldlier colleges.
In a feisty introduction, the author derides secular students’ amoral behavior, flabby relativism, and feel-good spirituality that is a sorry reflection of the real thing. Against “those who consider traditional religion a small and sometimes backward part of American life,” she poses those who reject a spiritually empty education. Some of her premises seem dubious. When she records that more students at Bob Jones University than at Harvard joined the army after 9/11, she begs the question of whether military service is superior to, say, fashioning an estimable foreign policy. There is considerable room for debate when she pays respect to elected leaders who profess their faith (as opposed to earning our trust), nor does she offer convincing evidence that formal religious education is the only route to an ethical life. It would seem that readers are in for a broadside against public education, but that proves to be not entirely the case. Riley finds an admirable degree of focus and diligence in religious institutions, yet she also finds much to deplore. Bob Jones University contains “everything that was (and is) wrong with the rural South, everything that is racist, backward, and intolerant.” Meanwhile, Thomas Aquinas College fosters a disturbing lack of skepticism, Notre Dame a purblind conservatism. The intellectual climate at Yeshiva University is equally incurious. Unsurprisingly, it’s when these schools evince a measure of ecumenism and doubt that Riley finds them most vibrant. It’s hard to judge from her account whether religious colleges will succeed in their aim “to give their students the tools to succeed in the secular world and the strength to do so without compromising their faith.”
Intriguing, though the message is decidedly mixed.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33045-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
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