Prolific, award-winning psychiatrist Coles (Old and on their Own, 1998; The Moral Life of Children, 1986, etc.) falters in this rambling exploration of secularism in modern culture and consciousness. After a spotty discussion of secular, contemporary themes in the Bible, such as the self, identity, and power (no mention of the Golden Calf incident or the Book of Job), Coles looks at secularism in late-19th- and 20th-century thought, drawing upon literary works ranging from Middlemarch to1984 and upon his conversations over the years with such figures as psychoanalyst Anna Freud, Catholic socialist Dorothy Day, and novelist/philosopher Walker Percy. Yet the raw material from these interviews is poorly shaped, as Coles tends to quote for pages on end, rather than paraphrase and respond to his subject’s comments. He also flits from topic to topic—egotism, abstract thinking, and the recent hegemony of biological psychiatry over psychotherapy, among many others—without delving sufficiently into any one, and without providing a sense of rhetorical direction. A more serious problem is Coles’s style, particularly his many run-on sentences and his occasional penchant for pretentious statements: “In the midst of the darkness science asserts and explores, we crave whatever light we can make for ourselves, even if we do so as the proverbial whistlers (or, as the expression goes, with hope against hope).” Perhaps in writing about “the secular mind,” which tends to be self-preoccupied and living in a “here-and-now world,” Coles has taken on an overly broad topic, at least for a brief work such as this. Consequently, readers, after absorbing interesting allusions from a host of important cultural works, may ask, “What the devil is the author really getting at?” Whatever it is, Coles never quite arrives.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-691-05805-9
Page Count: 197
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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