These nine essays comprise a kind of sequel to the author's famous foundation work of ``logotherapy,'' Man's Search for Meaning, with a focus on a person's spiritual rather than existential striving. Vienna-based psychiatrist and neurologist Frankl, the author of 31 books, makes some profound observations about the nature of religiosity, awareness of which he believes must be incorporated into psychology. For example, he says that humans have a ``spiritual unconscious,'' that each person has a latent intuition and yearning for the transcendent, and that this is often activated when a person must deal with the ``tragic triad—pain, guilt and death.'' Unfortunately, Frankl's prose never quite brings his important subject to life; it's too academic, with a dearth of vivid anecdotal material or case studies. And it sometimes lapses into Latinisms and abstruse formulations, as in his reference to ``pre-reflective ontological self-understanding,'' when what Frankl really means is ``the wisdom of the heart.'' As important, the author's notion of the transcendent is so broad as to be almost meaningless; thus, he defines God as ``the partner of our most intimate soliloquies,'' a definition that seems to involve a kind of theological sophistry which has little if anything to say about a person's responsibility to others. At the same time, Frankl's notion of faith is black and white; he states, ``I personally think that either belief in God is unconditional or is not belief at all. If it is unconditional, it will stand and face the fact that six million died in the Nazi holocaust,'' as if belief could never coexist with doubt, as if any theology could ``stand and face'' the shattering reality of mechanistic mass murder. Frankl's question about ultimate meaning and a few of his observations are profound, yet much else in this sometimes rambling book disappointingly stops at the surface.
Pub Date: Oct. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-306-45620-6
Page Count: 190
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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