Entertaining and naughty, learned and light. (12 b&w photos)
Public policy analyst Hart (Arizona State Univ.) takes on the nastiest subject of all and finds it complex, slippery, and discomfiting—downright wicked, in a word.
For his debut, the author employs a light, even frothy tone whose effervescence almost (but not quite) vitiates his intent. Like characters in an airplane disaster film, Plato and Kant, Hannah Arendt and George Bernard Shaw sit alongside Jerry Springer, Charles Manson, and Jerry Falwell in a literary work designed to be comfortable for everyone from professors and poets to couch potatoes and fundamentalist Christians. Hart begins with Americans’ paradoxical attitude toward evil: our fear and revulsion exist simultaneously with our delight in it. We love movies with really bad guys, or even Satan himself; we demand that CNN cover celebrity murders 24/7. Hart eventually arrives at a definition of evil as “an intentional human act that causes extreme harm to innocents and attacks our basic moral order.” He considers various explanations of how evil can exist in a world God created, examines Satan and other personifications of evil, and declares that he/she/it (probably) doesn’t exist. Hart then turns to a discussion of how evolutionary biologists have come to understand evil: we’re basically wild animals in clothes, and our jungle-and-savannah behavior remains with us because we haven’t really had much time to mature. Cursing and lying get demoted in two clever, funny chapters. Our swearing is not very interesting or creative, Hart contends, and everyone lies, so how can such minor transgressions be evil? One of the best chapters concerns the widely held view that the US overflows with satanic cults. Not so, asserts the author, quoting one law-enforcement official who claimed there has not been a single documented murder ever committed by such a group. Men will not like his chapter about how they have demonized women throughout history.
Entertaining and naughty, learned and light. (12 b&w photos)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-312-31281-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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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