A useful primer on the virtues of clear thinking, but somewhat lacking in substance.
An alternatingly enlightening and frustrating dialogue between one of the world’s greatest physicists and one of its greatest metaphysicists.
What is life? Is the universe conscious? What is the connection between mind and brain? Is God an illusion? These are some of the questions pondered and debated by Mlodinow (Theoretical Physics/CalTech, The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, 2008, etc.) and Chopra (Muhammad, 2010, etc.), who alternate writing short essays and responses. Chopra is known for his self-help books and his user-friendly, Eastern-lite philosophy, and he posits that scientists, with their materialist methods and concerns, have blinded themselves to the deeper realities of a universe infused with love and consciousness. He sees science as a cudgel used to beat spirituality into the dust. Mlodinow attempts, at first patiently but with increasing exasperation, to explain what science is and what it is meant to accomplish. He repeatedly stresses that “wish fulfillment should not shape our worldview.” His rationality and sardonic wit get the better of Chopra at nearly every turn; the latter exhibits occasional flashes of inspiration but evinces throughout a willful ignorance of the scientific method and a penchant for using words like "quantum" or "relativity" merely as meaningless props to buttress his fuzzy, deliberately vague spirituality. Though some readers may allow themselves to be convinced by his mantra that everything will be all right no matter what because the universe loves us, he fails to present a case for why science should unquestioningly accept his insights.
A useful primer on the virtues of clear thinking, but somewhat lacking in substance.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-88688-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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