An iconoclastic collection of 12 critical and biographical estimates of leading writers—Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Sartre, Russell, and others—with a final chapter commenting more briefly on figures such as Orwell, Mailer, Baldwin, and Chomsky. Johnson, past editor of the New Statesman and the Spectator, has written numerous historical studies (e.g., A History of the Jews, 1987, and Modern Times, 1983), some of them with a distinctly conservative cast. His aim now is to examine his subjects' morals and private lives as indicators of the value of their advice on how society should conduct itself. As portrayed here, most modern intellectual idols are made of dusty clay: Marx was dirty; Shelley and Tolstoy mistreated their families; Hemingway drank; Sartre and Russell were vague thinkers, with little more to their program than a wish to side with youth and the left. On the whole, Johnson gives us a gallery of spoiled, irresponsible, untrustworthy egoists, whose thinking, in his view, was often as careless as their lives. Their deepest and most persistent failing was that they valued concepts more than people, doctrine more than human relations. Ultimately, Johnson finds them, as a class, indirectly responsible for the sacrifice of millions of innocent people in the interest of misguided schemes for the betterment of humanity. The question of why these intellectuals were so influential remains unanswered here, however. An outspoken study, then, founded upon the belief that traditional values and virtues are the most reliable guides to private conduct and public policy—and that the opinions of intellectuals are often dangerous.
Pub Date: March 15, 1989
ISBN: 0061253170
Page Count: 420
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1989
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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