A vigorous treatment of how the sacred, in all its multifarious forms, continues to exercise power, even if sometimes it...
Knight (Tripping with Allah: Islam, Drugs, and Writing, 2013, etc.) traverses the scenic highways of Islamic history, seeking paths that connect him to Muhammad.
Beginning as it does with the author tripping on hallucinogenic drugs, it quickly becomes clear that this is not the apologia for fundamentalist religion that the title might suggest. As the author writes, “some would find the comparison distasteful, but when it comes to manipulating reality, texts and drugs might not be so far removed from each other.” Erudite, introspective, and relentlessly provocative, the author interrogates the traditions of Islamic historiography, Quranic exegesis, and hadith verification, elucidating how participating in the life of the Muslim community inevitably shapes, alters, and re-creates that community. Even when believers, in a Salafi vein, seek to do only that which was permissible to the Companions of the Prophet themselves, their actions and the justifications for those actions cannot help but be thoroughly modern, and the search for the ultimate origins becomes a hall of mirrors obscured by fog. In every reading of the Quran, writes Knight, “ideas that did not exist for the earliest Muslim community sneak [in]…find homes for themselves in the words, and give the appearance of having always been there.” The author’s humor and generosity of spirit shine through, but much will remain opaque to readers without a background in Islamic studies. The author is intimately familiar with obscure theological points from a dizzying array of traditions orthodox and heretical (or both at once), but he has curiously and uncharacteristically little to say about the lived experience of being Muslim and interacting with other Muslims.
A vigorous treatment of how the sacred, in all its multifarious forms, continues to exercise power, even if sometimes it just feels like “we’re arguing over what the mystery god intended to say in his address to a mystic in a cave some fifteen centuries ago.”Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-606-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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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