Is there such a thing as a universal code of ethics? A senior columnist for the Christian Science Monitor interviews 24 remarkable people from different cultures, beliefs, and walks of life and comes up with a short list of values that cross cultural boundaries. A shrinking world and technological progress, argues Kidder, mean that problems are increasingly global and demand solutions that presuppose a framework of values acceptable everywhere. Kidder (Re-Inventing the Future—not reviewed) challenges the fashionable belief that there are no universal values. He offers us the views of a diverse range of men and women who are involved in the fields of religion, education, business, literature, and politics, and who are regarded by their peers as ethical standard-bearers. We meet Federico Mayer, director general of UNESCO; Reuben Snake, a Native American tribal chief; Nien Cheng, the bestselling Chinese author; Graca Machel, Mozambique's former first lady; a Catholic priest; a Bangladeshi banker; a Buddhist monk in Japan; a Maori activist in New Zealand; and many more. Feminist historian Jill Ker Conway sees the rise of fundamentalism as filling a vacuum left by a secular education and the consequent erosion of moral value, and she looks forward to a revival of internationalism rooted in environmental awareness. Former president of Costa Rica Oscar Arias argues that demands for individual rights are less valid than a sense of responsibility derived from our inescapable interdependence with the ecosystem. In a concluding chapter Kidder picks out eight values that emerge from all the interviews including love, truthfulness, fairness, freedom, community, and tolerance. Since his approach is avowedly pragmatic, Kidder does not address philosophical problems, yet he is careful to nuance his position and to avoid the temptation of trying to prove too much. A popular but intelligent approach to a continuing concern.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-55542-603-4
Page Count: 324
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1994
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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