A spiritual manifesto that, despite its pretentions to scientific rigor, prefers postulation to careful argument.
An attempt to explain the workings of God and the human mind through the categories of modern physics.
Chaudhuri, a trained nuclear physician, fell into a coma for three weeks. In the midst of that experience, he heard the voice of God, inspiring some of the thoughts conveyed in this slim volume. He lists his primary objectives clearly from the start. He aims to explain the nature of God and the human mind in the language of physics, which largely means from the perspective of energy. God turns out to be beyond human perception precisely because he’s entirely composed of energy, but, Chaudhuri contends, we still have empirical confirmation of his existence by accessing his effects. Further, the author uses Einsteinian relativity in order to demonstrate that the human mind, also composed of energy, has a greater velocity than the energy of a physical atom. Since both God and the mind are made up of energy, prayer, properly understood as the transmission of electromagnetic energy, can close the distance between a person and God. Additionally, Chaudhuri provides what he calls an “atomic model” of the family, which, if properly understood, should promote familial harmony and reduce the occasion of divorce. There are other brief tangents. The author makes an argument for the divine significance of the number three and discusses the mental health of children. But the thematic thread that binds the work is the connection between God and people articulated in terms of this energy. Chaudhuri’s objectives are admirably grand, and he writes in simple prose, especially helpful given the theoretical abstruseness of the subject matter. The actual use of physics is more metaphorical than scientific, however, and is rife with unexamined assumptions. For example, what exactly does it mean to state that the “energy of mind is stronger than the energy of the physical atom because the velocity of mind is faster than the velocity of light, assuming the mind is the atom of consciousness”? Much of the book is similarly confusing, and the author seems uninterested in marshaling any substantive evidence for his claims.
A spiritual manifesto that, despite its pretentions to scientific rigor, prefers postulation to careful argument.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-7609-4
Page Count: 100
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Aug. 8, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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