Aside from occasional lapses in tone, a positive and edifying introduction to Hinduism that teems with basic facts and love...
This readable outline of Hinduism, Achuthananda’s debut, touches on the basics of the religion.
Hinduism’s dizzying array of mythologies means a steep learning curve for those new to the religion. With this short overview, Achuthananda attempts to provide a shortcut for readers, offering just enough detail and enticing context to lure readers into seeking out more in-depth works. The book begins with a discussion of the religion’s cultural context, touching historical traditions that played a part in the birth of Hinduism and in its later development, including informative sections on topics such as Zoroastrianism and Indian languages. From there, Achuthananda covers basic concepts of Hinduism, paying special attention to textual traditions, popular gods and cosmogony. Throughout this section, Achuthananda describes many traditions within Hinduism, rarely collapsing the plurality of beliefs into a single model. Additionally, for ideas such as Swarka and Naraka, Achuthananda provides analogues through which practitioners of Western religions might more easily comprehend the concepts; for example, he compares these two to heaven and hell, respectively, while clarifying differences in Hinduism’s characterizations. In a strange contrast to the title, Achuthananda only addresses a few of the Hindu gods and often asserts that the religion is a kind of monotheism. Readers expecting a long list of these many, many gods will only find brief mentions of a fraction here. Occasionally, the tone borders on condescension: Achuthananda claims to have written the book for a world “too busy to learn the lessons of life,” and briefly at the end of the “Controversies” section, his tone swerves into negativity in his disagreements with Wendy Doniger’s ideas about Hinduism. His titling a chapter on Doniger “Holy Queen of Sleaze” feels tasteless in a work that, up to that point, had been highly impartial and fair. Otherwise, Achuthananda’s explanations are helpful without oversimplifying or removing his emotional connection to the ideas, which may spur curious readers on to further study.
Aside from occasional lapses in tone, a positive and edifying introduction to Hinduism that teems with basic facts and love for the faith.Pub Date: July 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481825528
Page Count: 218
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2013
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
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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