A sometimes-insightful, sometimes–mean-spirited and abstruse meditation on ethics.
A vehement philosophical manifesto that uses metaphysical theory to justify right-wing policy proposals.
O’Reilly (Authority, Creativity and the Third Imperium: Why God’s Knowledge of Himself, Outside Himself Is Important, 2015, etc.), a travel-book editor and ex-seminarian with a degree in existential phenomenology and psychology, brings together Aristotelian philosophy, unorthodox theology, and even quantum mechanics and string theory to craft an intellectual and moral basis for American politics and policy. The core of the book is an extremely difficult, often incomprehensible analysis of the nature of God, time, and the human soul, full of endless rehashes of mystical conundrums: “How can we understand the mechanism whereby the Eternal can enter or manipulate time without any change occurring in the eternal’s nature?” The book eventually offers a more coherent approach to mundane morality, arguing cogently that people should develop clear ethical systems built on rational principles of right action rather than just doing whatever feels good—as, he contends, our modern culture teaches. The specifics of this moral reclamation project center on familiar preoccupations of the religious right; for example, O’Reilly denounces homosexuality as a “moral disability” and asserts that “excessive or unrepentant masturbation” is a gateway to gayness. He compares doctors who perform late-term abortions to “demons,” adding that “the only thing you can do with a demon is lock it up or shoot it”; he also calls for more executions to deter crime and reduce prison expenditures. The loose-limbed text ranges haphazardly across the millennia, examining thinkers from Plato to St. Thomas Aquinas, John Adams, Sigmund Freud, and rapper/actor Ice-T. His general encouragement of a thoughtful, morally serious approach to life is edifying, and his commentary is sometimes incisive. Unfortunately, the book’s fixation on murky philosophical and theological abstractions often makes the prose nearly impossible to follow: “Imagine infinite energy, force and consciousness knowing itself as other than itself….It has to know itself within limits; in order to do that it self-creates time and space but the force with which it creates limits is infinite in relation to its own nature.” Even worse, for all of this book’s cosmic dilations on first principles, the moral vision that it derives from them seems petty and crabbed.
A sometimes-insightful, sometimes–mean-spirited and abstruse meditation on ethics.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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