Of less appeal than Lance Morrow’s Evil (2003), which covers much the same ground in a rather more inclusive and certainly...
Bad things are afoot and ascendant, says Guinness, and “at a time when intellectual and moral responses to evil are weaker, more controversial, and more confused than they have been for centuries.”
Evil stalks the earth because humans do, it’s part of the angel-and-demon dichotomy. Yet, Guinness (The American Hour, 1992, etc.) writes, evil casts an ever-larger shadow, and disturbing trends require us to rethink evil in our day: it has steadily increased in reach and scale in modern times; modern people don’t know how to respond to it; and—contra those who see religious fundamentalism as an engine of intolerance and other unpleasant behavior—secularist regimes are the cause of the worst atrocities of the day, and secularist regimes are everywhere. Gore Vidal, who has lately been condemning monotheism, won’t buy the argument, and neither will many other people with a memory for names such as Bosnia and the Taliban: set religious absolutism and nonreligious absolutism side by side, they might object, and you wind up with much the same bleak landscape of the soul, save that it’s easier to get a drink in an atheist country. But no matter. Nominally ecumenical, Guinness soon gets around to the need for religious faith in the war against evil; nonbelievers, it appears, just aren’t up to the job. “Freedom,” he writes in a nicely circular turn, “requires virtue, virtue requires faith of some sort, and faith requires freedom.” Moreover, against the ills of dualism and utopianism, Guinness posits that the Christian and Jewish “realism” is uniquely equipped for the fight; “Judaism and the Christian faith,” he continues, “are now credited for keeping alive the dream of justice that transcends all wrong.” Fans of the Dalai Lama and Gandhi may have objections there, but again, no matter; only faith, Guinness concludes, and presumably only of the Christian and Jewish stripes, “can provide the best truths to come to terms with evil.”
Of less appeal than Lance Morrow’s Evil (2003), which covers much the same ground in a rather more inclusive and certainly more thought-provoking way; still, of interest to the choir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-058636-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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