Arden, a white South African who left her homeland in 1966 for the US, returns and trains to become a sangoma, a traditional healer; her first book is a mostly absorbing description of this spiritual and political journey. Arden goes back to South Africa filled with guilt and shame about her whiteness. After a series of visions, she visits a black seer who tells her that she has ``the spirit'' and must study to become a sangoma. What ensues is an often moving tale of a white woman struggling to reach across racial barriers in a dramatically charged environment, a Westerner trying to let go of her skepticism about superstition and alternative healing, and an individual finding that she possesses completely unexpected powers. Her descriptions of the African landscape are stunning in their visual specificity. However, there are points at which Arden's originality flags; she slips in a fair number of appeals to the ``universe,'' not to mention references to ``Mother Earth'' and her ``nurturing `' powers. The final kicker, though, is in the last paragraph: ``We rode into that enchanted sunset.'' Sometimes, too, her descriptions are a bit repetitive—she too often uses the adjective ``salmon'' to describe the sky, for instance. Throughout, too, her narrative displays far too little sense of humor, considering the absurdity of many of the predicaments she faces. She is a Californian vegetarian who is ethically and viscerally squeamish about killing animals—a crucial part of sangoma training and ritual—yet she is relentlessly earnest about these conflicts. Should interest anyone who wants to know more about race relations, post-apartheid South Africa, or traditional healing; it is also a strong and unusually concrete spiritual memoir, despite some triteness and a distressing humorlessness.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4207-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1996
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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