Perhaps the clue to this odd rehashing of questions about life and death lies in the credentials of the author: Applewhite's (Cosmic Fishing, 1977) career includes long-term collaboration with Buckminster Fuller (Applewhite co-authored Synergetics) and 25 years as ``one of the chief sifters of intelligence for the CIA.'' Both occupations demand a fiercely inquiring mind, able to rove over the great and the trivial, picking up nuggets along the way. And so Applewhite has in this compendium of conjectures and facts about the phenomena of life and death, the myriad attempts to define them and to distinguish the biological from the merely material. He begins with acknowledging the elusiveness of the goal; there is no scientific definition of life. Indeed, he is quick to acknowledge that right-to-life debates about when life begins are meaningless and irrelevant to biologists, who banish the topic to religion and metaphysics. In due course, he deals with the physics, chemistry, and molecular biology of biota in all forms from borderline viruses to man, with appropriate excursions into cosmology, evolution, sexuality, Freud, cell and molecular biology, the genetic code, the mind-brain conundrum, aging, disease, near- death experiences, death, and immortality. Nearly every page quotes an authority (e.g., Schrîdinger, Ernst Mayr, E.O. Wilson, S.J. Gould). A recurrent theme is the human drive to classify and organize, often resulting in specialization and hierarchical ordering. There is even a long appendix enumerating the many- splintered fields that constitute biology today. The main point of all this erudition seems to be that we don't have answers and that at best we have to live with dualities: identity and change, chance and necessity. ``Ambivalence and ambiguity prevail.'' No news there!
Pub Date: June 28, 1991
ISBN: 0-312-05944-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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
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