Offers an exciting path for escaping intellectual ruts.
With his dog, Bella, serving as muse, questioner and devil’s advocate, Fisher aims to generate a new way of thinking about science, politics, economics and religion.
Fisher (Logic of Economic Discovery, 1986) begins by warning readers about the radical nature of his book, which encourages an intellectual rebellion against the siren song of social conditioning. “History is chock full of stories of those who have been shunned and punished for…thinking differently,” he cautions. This admonition may cause some readers to assume that the book will overflow with angry, anarchistic railings at all social convention. Such is not the case. With a Ph.D. in economics from Duke University and a degree from Harvard Law School, Fisher is well-equipped to discuss the power and process of intellectual discovery. Although he uses a light, conversational tone, with frequent interruptions from Bella that are alternately amusing and annoying, it’s a weighty subject. Drawing examples from Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, Karl Marx and other well-known thinkers, he systematically explores the role of science and its relationship to truth. Ideally, Fisher writes, science is a process. Conjecture should be constructively criticized; this criticism should engender more conjecture and, ultimately, new growth in understanding. This cycle of examining ideas requires an intellectual courage that, Fisher argues, is on the decline; the loss of such courage sets us on a path of blindly following self-appointed experts who gradually rob us of our liberties simply by creating a dependency on their so-called “rational” expert opinions. Intellectual rebellion, however, is not reserved for science alone. Fisher further applies this same process in his analysis of a wide range of topics—capitalism, economics, politics, race and religion. Paralleling Marx’s views on class consciousness, Fisher presents a rational, thorough analysis of modern thinking: Modern “experts”—those who believe they are the best qualified to determine what is rational and ultimately true—“mistake their own interests for a set of universal values.” Anyone who thinks otherwise is inherently irrational, and it’s this suppression of individual thought and discovery that will be this century’s greatest struggle.
Offers an exciting path for escaping intellectual ruts.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2012
ISBN: 978-1479156498
Page Count: 390
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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