Eminent English historian of ideas Johnson (The Birth of the Modern, 1991, etc.) draws on his years of research and his classic Roman Catholicism to offer a worldview that is as personal as it is intellectually provocative. An ability to handle colossal themes with well-informed and penetrating analysis has long been a hallmark of Johnson's writing. Here he develops some of the key ideas of his Modern Times (e.g., that Marxism and Nazism led to unprecedented human misery through their moral relativism) in a synthesis that takes up the perennial questions of conscience, the existence of God in the face of a frequently evil world, and the challenge of death. Johnson has much to say about the failure of post-Enlightenment substitutes for religion, such as rationalism and social utopianism. In a chapter on the value of artists he makes a spirited defense of spending vast sums of money to build cathedrals, which he sees as both pleasing to God and vital expressions of the human spirit. There are chapters on environmental issues, inclusive language (which he uses), and the relations between Catholics and Jews. He concludes with open-ended explorations of the traditional Four Last Things of Catholic theology: death, judgment, hell (with the emphasis on purgatory), and heaven. An appendix contains a set of his private prayers. Johnson writes superb English and he mingles his arguments with telling and often amusing anecdotes. Although it is tempting to label Johnson a conservative—he is a friend of Margaret Thatcher's and a staunch admirer of Pope John Paul II—his forthright views constantly surprise and his positions are often reminiscent of his 18th-century namesake and hero, Dr. Samuel Johnson. Nuanced and always informative, Johnson is guaranteed to stimulate even when he does not convince.
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-06-017344-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 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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