Therapy for people who are grieving pets, and a litmus test for self-professed nature lovers.
The moral conundrums of the human-animal bond.
Few readers will be able to resist the moving episodes from an Australian childhood Gaita (Philosophy/Kings College London; A Common Humanity, not reviewed, etc.) initially relates, based largely on his father’s natural affection and affinity for animals in general and, specifically, house pets Jack the cockatoo and Orloff the dog. Tender and affecting, they are economically rendered with obvious sincerity. But—and there are hints this is coming—this is not about letting us off easy with misty, sentimental recollections about the animals in our lives. Readers must join a forced march into intellectual battle with the major paradoxes and contradictions of those so-called bonds and how society tends to buffer them. It’s not just confronting the idea of “mass murder” of animals for food, clothing, and convenience, for example, but why fish, cows, and chickens have to die to feed your pet cat. Really, why? While many of these philosophical forays are spun out of the author’s close ties with animals, some digress considerably, as does a longish chapter on how the challenges and dangers of mountaineering as a hobby shaped his contemplations on life and reality—somewhat redeemed by a stunning anecdote from the writings of famed Alpinist Walter Bonatti on finding a butterfly dying in the snow at high altitude. A consistent undercurrent plumbs the nature of animals as “sensate” creatures, as when Gaita states: “It is obvious why our understanding of animals should be informed by rigorous, controlled observation which is cautious in coming to conclusions.” But even this, he insists, must be mediated by philosophical inquiry. Science can’t decide whether chimps use language, for example, unless we fully establish and agree on what constitutes language.
Therapy for people who are grieving pets, and a litmus test for self-professed nature lovers.Pub Date: July 27, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-6110-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 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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