Amusing and occasionally insightful, but too reliant on oversimplification.
A lighthearted examination of major life milestones through the lens of major philosophical thinkers.
Smith’s latest dips into the thought of Montesquieu, Arendt and Kant, among others, to lend a philosophical flair to essays on common life experiences. A former Prize Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Smith (Breakfast with Socrates, 2010) writes with a conversational bent, moving quickly through his arguments and making deft leaps from the mundane to the abstract. His explanations of difficult concepts are clear without being condescending. Unfortunately, there are moments where the author’s intellectual authority is marred by his refusal to think beyond the trite, as in an exploration of young love and first kisses. Smith acknowledges that the idea that teenage boys want to quickly move beyond kissing into sex, as opposed to their female counterparts, is a stereotype, but doesn’t bother to explore other scenarios. This is especially disappointing given his brilliant analysis, in the same chapter, of one of the most famous first kisses in literature, between Romeo and Juliet. It’s a shame he didn't delve deeper into the play and offer his thoughts on Juliet’s breathlessly erotic soliloquy (“Gallop apace, you fiery-footed steeds…”), surely a place to consider that teenage girls, too, might want more than a kiss. The stereotypes continue in “Getting a Job,” in which Smith writes that women have a different relationship to work than men because their ability to have children “might mean depending on a man at some point to bring home the bacon.”
Amusing and occasionally insightful, but too reliant on oversimplification.Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8687-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
An unconvincing attempt to prove the existence of God in a postmodern culture. It's always refreshing when intellectuals admit their mistakes, and to hear this Harvard-educated philosopher gracefully concede that his atheism was ``so dead wrong'' is nearly enough to melt a reader's heart. But only nearly, because the journey that brought him to faith is almost impossible to translate as ``evidence'' to prove God's existence to others. Glynn's own watershed moments were based in science and psychology, and he examines recent developments in these fields that he sees as unmistakable proof of a higher being. Contemporary physics, for example, has moved toward a ``triumph of mechanism over teleology'' and shows that the chance of life's appearance in our universe is so slight that if any one of the many factors involved had been a tad different, we wouldn't be here arguing the point today. Fair enough, but it is still a long jump from this apparent randomness to Glynn's conclusion—that life evolved in this manner to make way for God's ultimate creation, humankind. The second part of this book is even more problematic; Glynn employs psychological findings and near-death experiences as evidence for God. He rightly criticizes Freudian psychology for its hostility to religion and then goes on to argue that religious people are more likely to report happier, less traumatic lives than the nonreligious. That may be so, but how does this functionalist exploration of religious faith prove the existence of God? And finally, his insufficiently skeptical chapter on near-death experiences damages the credibility of the whole book. Although there are some intriguing arguments here, Glynn's is an entirely one-sided approach, and the connections between the ``evidence'' and his conclusion require too far a leap of faith.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7615-0941-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
Another collection of brash, intelligent essays on economics by the author of The Armchair Economist (1993). Landsburg, a columnist for the online magazine Slate, turns his hand to demystifying everyday economics, using his nine-year- old daughter as a sounding board. While his exchanges with Cayley can turn overly sentimental, Landsburg's sharp wit and sharper insight make this a fun read for anyone with a taste for logic and unbiased opinions. Landsburg begins a discussion on NAFTA by debunking the notion that the number of workers who quit their jobs because of pay cuts represents the true cost of foreign competition. It's the workers who stay and take a pay cut, he argues, who are the real losers, because they bear the full brunt of the loss in wages. He later points out that while some would argue that it's unfair to the $16-an-hour worker to lose a job to a $3-an-hour worker, it's actually the public who, from the point of view of pure economics, has been cheated: They've been overpaying for products made by overpriced workers. At times, Landsburg risks sounding like a curmudgeon: He's irritated that Cayley's teachers dictate on the environment, sex, and drugs. But he rightly points out that even the best-intentioned environmental lesson often consists simply of memorizing the number of acres of rainforest lost, rather than a more complex analysis of land use. His best response is saved for Cayley's Hebrew school class: When asked to write an essay that begins ``To be more like God, I will . . .'' students penned treacly lines such as ``I will be kind to animals.'' Landsburg's stinging response: ``I will slay the first born of my enemies.'' Often funny and at times poetic, these essays are eminently readable and always smart. (Radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-82755-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
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