Friedman (Hebrew and Comp. Lit./Univ. of Calif., San Diego; Who Wrote the Bible?, 1987) traces the theme of God's disappearance in the Hebrew Bible and in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche and proposes a new religious outlook based on a synthesis of the Big Bang theory and Kabbalah. Dramatic interventions of God in human affairs, like the parting of the Red Sea, are found in the earlier books of the Bible and gradually diminish, according to Friedman, as the human race learns to take responsibility for its own destiny, above all with the institution of rabbinic Judaism, in which men hand down decisions concerning God's law. Friedman offers a stimulating analysis of Nietzsche's Zarathustra and the Superman, with parallels from Dostoevsky, arguing that both writers experienced the full weight of the disappearance of God and man's consequent loneliness. Finally, he speculates that science, which had seemed to strip the world of its religious meaning, is now reuniting us with God as we learn about cosmic background radiation from the explosion that gave birth to the universe. The ``singularity,'' he suggests, from which the universe is expanding vindicates the Kabbalah's mystical theory that the visible universe emanated from a single, unknowable point. He argueswithout much evidencethat, in a world where God seems absent, we will surely find a basis for morality in the idea of loyalty to the human species. Friedman exaggerates the importance of the short-lived Death of God theology of the '60s, and in his ideal of a cosmic and somewhat pantheistic deity, he seems to equate the notion of a personal God with anthropomorphism. And many readers will dispute Friedman's dismissal of Dostoevsky's religiosity and of the present-day openness to contemplative awareness of God's presence. A nontheological approach to a profoundly theological question that is both exciting and inevitably limited.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-29434-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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