The book might provide more inspiration to fellow alcoholics than it will add to the scholarship on three figures of various...
A former religion reporter details the occasionally intersecting lives of three spiritual seekers in order to tell the story that compels him more, a personal account of addiction, recovery and sobriety.
“Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson set the stage for the spiritual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,” writes the author of the “famous writer,” “forgotten philosopher” and “hopeless drunk” of his subtitle. “They distilled the spirits of organized religion into a powerful new blend that would help change the way Americans practice their faith and live their lives.” Though Lattin (The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, 2010) maintains an engaging, conversational tone as he meanders through the lives of these three, their selection might seem arbitrary, with Heard seemingly the odd man out. Even if one accepts his influence on The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, written by Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the reader might agree with one contemporary who says, “There was something not quite right about Gerald Heard.” The increasingly mystic and ascetic philosopher meditated six hours a day, practiced celibacy while advising married couples to stop having relations, and retreated from contact with formerly close friends such as Huxley. As for Wilson, who published pieces by both of the other two in his AA Grapevine publication, he was an early advocate of LSD who remained addicted to sex and tobacco, and he howled for whiskey on his deathbed. The key figure in this “blend of memoir and biography” is Lattin, whose narrative arc might be the strangest. He somehow balanced his religion reportage with a descent into cocaine addiction and alcoholism, and he sees this book as a crucial element in his ongoing sobriety (five years now), even though some may feel it violates the anonymity precept of AA. “One of the things I learned from AA is that many of us drink in an effort to quench a religious thirst,” he writes. “It’s how we get some temporary relief from the spiritual emptiness.”
The book might provide more inspiration to fellow alcoholics than it will add to the scholarship on three figures of various accomplishment and renown.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-520-27232-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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
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
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