A commendable effort well-executed.
A call for compassion based on the teachings of the world’s religions.
After a fruitful career studying and writing about comparative religion, Armstrong (The Case for God, 2009; etc.) attempts to synthesize what she has learned in one manageable and practical volume. Her goal is to increase awareness that compassion is at the heart of all major world religions and to encourage her readers to practice this virtue. Compassion, she writes, is “an attitude of principled, consistent altruism,” most often expressed in some variation of the Golden Rule. As the unifying tie of the world’s religions, compassion is the one practice most able to bring about peace in the world. Armstrong structures her book as a 12-step guide toward becoming a more compassionate person. The author begins by giving readers the task of learning more about compassion and how it is practiced across the world and across time. She exhorts readers to become more self-aware and to love oneself (“The Golden Rule requires self-knowledge; it asks that we use our own feelings as a guide to our behavior with others”), and she encourages the realization of how little we really know about other people and other cultures, and to use that insight to more fully practice empathy. Armstrong also calls upon society to practice more effective communication: “We need to ask ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth, whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling.” Her steps conclude with the appeal to love one’s enemies. Though the author realizes that her book may not result in a newly enlightened populace, she hopes to inspire readers to at least begin the process of becoming more compassionate. For those committed to the task, she cautions that “the attempt to become a compassionate human being is a lifelong project.” As always, Armstrong weaves together the teachings of diverse religions in a graceful, approachable manner.
A commendable effort well-executed.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-59559-1
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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