For those who know they want a meaningful spiritual life, but don—t know where to find one. McLennan, long-time chaplain at Tufts University and the inspiration for Doonesbury’s Rev. Scotty Sloan, is ecumenical to a fault. No original metaphors here: McLennan sees himself as the mountain guide for lost trekkers—we—re all trying to bushwhack our way to the top of the same mountain, but, as any good college chaplain knows, there are many paths up. In nine easy steps, McLennan can get you to the top. First, you must be open to spiritual development and change, recognizing that your journey is every bit as important as your destination. Once you have mastered openness, you can move on to thinking about religion—engaging critically rather than falling back on knee-jerk reactions ingrained in childhood. Next comes experiencing, the stage in which —new ways will emerge to see the sunrise, hear the birds sing, smell the flowers, taste food, and feel the wind in your face.— Then, pick a religious path and, as the folks at Nike say, just do it: Read, worship, and eat your chosen religion. After you—ve partaken of gefilte fish and perused a few books by Lawrence Kushner, you—re ready to talk with —fellow travelers,— be they clergy or lay. Then move on to exploring other faiths, since learning about Ramadan can help you find keeping kosher more meaningful. The chapter on —Sitting— extols you to pray or meditate, and —Suffering— explores the role of religion during crisis. Finally, —Rejoicing— reminds us of the spiritual highs to be found in holiday feasts, sing-alongs, and weddings. Centuries hence, historians of late-20th-century America will finger this guide as evidence that millennial Americans were a spiritual people, but that theirs was a spirituality drenched in the easy, feel-good language of consumerism: Picking a religion is not so different from picking a new car. McLennan’s is less an aid to hikers than a handbook for outlet-mall devotees.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-065347-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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