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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
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.
bookshelf
