An often moving defense of the need for religion in modern times.
A Soviet-born doctor reflects on a life devoted to Judaism.
Tsesis (Communist Daze, 2017) writes that his parents grew up in the Jewish faith but were compelled to hide their religious allegiance under authoritarian Soviet rule. As a result, the author observes, their commitment to their Jewish faith atrophied, and their suppressed spirituality eventually became absent. Tsesis grew up as a cultural but not actively religious Jew, for the most part, but even as a young man, he experienced a profound attraction to religion; at one point, he tells of having a dream in which he encountered the “intuitive awareness of Divine Presence.” As he experienced ferocious anti-Semitism in his life, he remained impressed by the irrepressibility of faith and the historical adaptability of the Jewish people. His memoir is more an assemblage of essays than it is a linear, comprehensive autobiography, as he not only records his life of faith, but also furnishes a rational explanation of it. According to Tsesis, only the reality of a monotheistic god could ever adequately account for the “miraculous diversity of our amazing world.” In often poetical and rousing terms, he pits his deep appreciation of the “unfathomable mystery of existence” against communistic ideology and dogmatic atheism. He even provides an anatomy of what he sees as the limitations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, accepting many of its chief principles but denying that it captures the full spectrum of human experience. Tsesis’ life is a memorably eventful one, deeply affected by the modern rise of totalitarianism. He recounts his spiritual awakening with a combination of philosophical wonder and openhanded emotion—which makes for a stirring combination. In particular, his account of living under Soviet rule is extraordinary; while he was a physician in Odessa, he says, he was asked to lead a “scientific atheism study group.” However, he occasionally indulges his own brand of dogmatism, heavy-handedly branding atheism a “false religion,” equating it with “naïve simplicity,” and accusing it of reducing life to “pointless vanity.”
An often moving defense of the need for religion in modern times.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-89733-732-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
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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