Powerful, persuasive encouragement toward better and wiser loving.
A spirited analysis of the concept of love and romantic relationships.
In his debut nonfiction work, Hakim tackles the very nature of love and its “four great enemies”: violence, pettiness, vanity, and what he calls a mindless, automatic “reproductive agenda.” He’s quick to stress that these enemies come from within each one of us: “Out of fear, confusion, or habit, we have convinced ourselves that a small or large dose of them is necessary for our survival,” he writes. “Without them, we feel naked, unbearably vulnerable.” His literate, straightforward narrative proposes to counter them with four cardinal virtues, reinforced by the Shambhala Buddhist tradition in which the author grew up: gentleness, grace, charm, and mystery, along with their parallels: meekness, perkiness, outrageousness, and inscrutability. Hakim takes his readers through a highly detailed, levelheaded exploration of these concepts, fleshing them out with references to a wide array of sources and inspirations, from the Hawaiian forgiveness ritual of Ho’oponopono to the writings of the Tao Te Ching to the wisdom of the Star Wars franchise’s Yoda. In many ways, the cry of medieval troubadour Bernard de Ventadour, quoted here, provides the raison d’être of the book: “Ah God! If one could distinguish sincere lovers from fakes, and if flatterers and cheats wore horns on the forehead!” Similarly, Hakim’s work aims to help readers make their way through a confusing thicket. One of its hallmarks is its engagingly direct focus on relationship essentials, such as earnestly listening to one’s lover, looking at him or her directly in the eye, and resolving disputes with affection and understanding. This genuinely helpful relationship book reads smoothly and quickly, propelled by often graceful prose: “Having overcome violence, we possess great gentleness,” the author writes in a typical passage. “Having overcome pettiness, we have grace. As a further extension of the drive toward greater humanity, we come powerful, charming.”
Powerful, persuasive encouragement toward better and wiser loving.Pub Date: April 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9981553-0-2
Page Count: -
Publisher: Wise Love Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2017
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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