An erudite opus demanding substantial patience, intelligence and education from its readers.
Journalist and intellectual historian Watson (The Great Divide: Nature and Human Nature in the Old World and the New, 2012, etc.) analyzes what people have done to supplant or supplement religion since Nietzsche declared the death of God in the late 19th century.
The author begins with the horror of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie (religion out of control) and returns to Rushdie some 500 pages later. In between is a rich mixture of cultural, intellectual, political and religious history that demands much of readers and is in ways a multilayered chronicle of the past 140 years. But a basic question underlies all: What do we do without God? Watson looks initially at the effects Nietzsche had on the arts (Thomas Mann and Isadora Duncan write and dance through this section) and then looks at American thinkers including Emerson William James, John Dewey and George Santayana. Poets and artists of various stripes also figure prominently (Rimbaud, Cézanne, Bergson), and Freud makes an early appearance as well (he returns periodically). Playwrights are next (Strindberg, Shaw, Chekhov most prominently) before he devotes a chapter to the impressionist painters and their successors. In a solid chapter about the power of desire, a topic to which he returns, Watson explores the works of Gide, Henry James, Wells and Proust. And on the author goes, moving seamlessly from literature to art, philosophy, psychology, political movements, world war, drama and popular culture (the Doors, Dylan, etc.). Watson blasts the world’s religions for their failures during the Holocaust, but he doesn’t have a lot to say about music (a little bit about Charlie Parker and bebop). He delivers a sturdy chapter on the works of today’s scientific atheists (Dawkins, Harris, Pinker) and ends with praise and analysis of Ronald Dworkin.
An erudite opus demanding substantial patience, intelligence and education from its readers.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5431-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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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