A solid history that will be particularly useful to students of colonialism.
A serviceable account of two 19th-century missionaries’ travels through the South Seas, Asia, and Africa.
To further the interests of God and Empire, British evangelicals George Bennet and Daniel Tyerman gladly accepted a charge from the London Missionary Society to inspect the organization’s far-flung network of missions and report on their successes and failures. In 1821, the two set out for the South Seas, where they made their way from one island chain to another, visiting with fellow pastors and reassuring converts to Christianity that they would enjoy divine forgiveness for their sins. Though occasionally put off by certain native practices—a fondness for infanticide on the island of Raiatea, for one—the pair kept reasonably open minds, and their reports provide a wealth of ethnographic data on then utterly unfamiliar cultures. Wondering, for instance, why it was that jackals were free to roam the streets in India, they concluded, “the impunity [these creatures] enjoy is a necessary provision for the health and comfort of human society, in a climate and a place where life and death are so frequently in contact, that, unless the perishing remains of mortality were buried out of sight as quickly as possible, existence would be intolerable, and the plague perpetual.” Quoting liberally from his subjects’ writings, Hiney (Raymond Chandler, 1997) follows the intrepid travelers to such places as Tahiti, China, and the Kalahari Desert, where they confronted pirates, slavers, ravening animals, and ferocious storms, surviving all that God could throw at them for nearly eight years. Bennet eventually returned to England from the tropics, only to find himself shivering through one of the coldest winters on record; in the years left to him, he drew on his experiences to organize antislavery efforts and drum up support for the Missionary Society, which endured until 1977.
A solid history that will be particularly useful to students of colonialism.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-87113-823-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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