A smart, challenging discourse that succeeds despite an annoyingly unapologetic fondness for dry, academic wordplay.
A Jungian psychoanalyst explores the deep human need for concepts of wholeness and completeness and finds that need is the source of many problems.
Cosmic-tuned mandalas and mass murders might seem diametrically opposed—but that’s only at first blush. According to Salman, seemingly peaceful spiritual and social concepts of oneness have a propensity to enslave the collective imagination. What follows is a rigorous academic undertaking that finds danger amid what the author calls “magic circles”—any convention or system purporting to be the tonic for humankind’s nagging fear of dissolution. The author examines varying political systems, religious practices and psychoanalytic thought throughout history and gauges their essential reliance on that phantom notion of totality. The most accessible and relevant example of this is the Internet. Despite the level playing field and enlightened interconnectivity that the Internet promises, the author notes that the Web’s “wholeness” can also be used for sinister aims—such as the spread of terror. For every tweet of free speech, there’s an echo chamber of narrow-minded venom. And, Salman believes, such is the case with all notions of wholeness; the completeness seems beneficial but in fact causes harm and rifts among people. Salman’s command of language is impressive, but many readers may find her prose dense and overly academic: “As he matured, Jung elaborated the goal of totality using the alchemical imagery of the stone (the seed) that begins its journey as a chaotic massa confusa…” and so on. Readers who rack their personal lexicons and still can’t shake out terms like “pharmakon” and “pychopomps” will undoubtedly feel left out. Those with enough fortitude and endurance to digest the “mythopoetic” mind, however, will be rewarded. Understanding the roots of fundamentalism and totalitarianism is challenging, but worth contemplating.
A smart, challenging discourse that succeeds despite an annoyingly unapologetic fondness for dry, academic wordplay.Pub Date: July 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1935528456
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Spring Journal, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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