At a time when academic philosophy, grown technical and arcane in recent decades, is reaching for a wider audience, this book helps initiate what seems a natural dialogue between the wisdom of ancient texts and the wisdom of advanced years. At age 33 (the “Christological year,” as an older mentor to the secular Jewish writer of this book wryly puts it in the opening pages), Manheimer (Philosophy/Univ. of North Carolina, Asheville) began teaching philosophy to senior citizens and has continued in that line of endeavor up through his now 50-plus years. The author muses on the dialogues he has facilitated between philosophy and the seniors. The book comprises remembered conversations with a sampling of elderly students and friends, reconstructions of classroom and conference discussions, retellings of philosophical classics—from Plato to Augustine to John Stuart Mill—and the author’s own thoughts, both personal and abstract, on the aging process, especially as it affects the experience of time. Though the chapters read as a series of philosophical vignettes—or etudes, to borrow Manheimer’s own metaphor—the book achieves continuity through its centering idea, that the aging process coincides with modernity’s quest to incorporate isolated individuals into larger wholes of meaning. The “map to the end of time” is a picture that matures with age of inter-related lives, each of which draws meaning from its place in relation with the others. Manheimer’s regard for the philosophical classics and his faithfulness to actual, remembered discussions keep his book on course and safely delivered from facile, feel-good conclusions. Indeed, the book refrains from conclusiveness as such, casting its final word as recommendations for further reading. With a little more shaping, this book might have become an equivalent for seniors of the philosophical novel, Sophie’s World, by Joestein Gaarder, which sets philosophy in dialogue with a child. A charming, novelistic reflection on philosophy by a teacher and student of the elderly.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04725-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION | PSYCHOLOGY | HISTORICAL & MILITARY
Did you like this book?
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
Categories: PHILOSOPHY & RELIGION
Did you like this book?
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
