The Larsens (Stephen: The Mythic Imagination, 1990; Robin: a Swedenborg scholar), longtime friends and students of Joseph Campbell (1904-87), team up—with Campbell family permission and full access to his papers—to deliver a hefty but hollow biography of the illustrious expositor of world myths. Plodding resolutely and diligently through Campbell's life, the authors begin with the early experiences that provided the impetus for their subject's research. Fascinated by Native Americans as a youth, Campbell, born in N.Y.C., absorbed their wood-lore and mythology through voracious reading and the guidance of an old naturalist neighbor. Early trips to the West Coast and Europe, plus later sojourns as a young scholar in Paris, Munich, and other cultural centers made Campbell a citizen of the world, and also brought chance meetings with other travelers who would become valued friends—the Indian mystic Krishnamurti among them. Another friendship led to John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and their circle, while Campbell's studies eventually brought him, in 1934, to a teaching career at Sarah Lawrence, where he met future wife Jean Erdman, a student. A popular figure in the classroom, Campbell, with the 1949 publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, found his reputation spreading in scholarly circles as well, while encounters with other dynamic figures such as Maya Deren or Heinrich Zimmer in New York, and journeys to India and the Far East, added fuel to this mythological quest. Remaining decades of travel and meetings with the notable and famous receive equally lavish attention here, bolstered throughout by extensive quotations from Campbell's journals and correspondence—but, even so, the discussion is often rarely more than a calendar of events and an apologia for Campbell's apolitical nature and other traits. A lackluster offering, with an abundance of information but little critical distance or depth. (Fifty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-385-26635-9
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1991
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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