A guru-and-disciple account of a pilgrimage to a Tibetan Buddhist sacred site. Thurman (Religion/Columbia Univ.; Inner Revolution, 1998, etc.), president of Tibet House in New York City, teamed up with his former student and surrogate son, Wise (Tesla, 1994) and other pilgrims on a 1996 journey to Mount Kailash in Tibet. This is their account of the journey—or rather, Wise’s account, because apart from Thurman’s autobiographical introduction, his contributions consist of his daily teachings from the trip, which Wise tape-recorded. Since all of the trip participants were novices to Buddhism, this dharma/teaching is geared for the beginner and offers a helpful introduction to esoteric (tantric) Buddhism. As the pilgrims circle Mount Kailash, the most revered peak in Tibet, Thurman outlines the spokes of “the blade wheel of mind reform,” encouraging the hikers to empty themselves of samsara (suffering) and to practice compassion for all beings. (All beings, that is, except for the occupying Chinese, who are vilified and stereotyped throughout the book as warlike, secular, and universally cruel, while the Tibetans’ “whole culture . . . [is] magical.”) Apart from its overt political message and more oblique spiritual instruction, the book also extends to us the rare chance to enjoy armchair traveling in an area off-limits to casual tourists. Wise’s sections make for an absorbing travelogue, complete with descriptions of altitude sickness and an exciting tundric mountain climb near the end (shades of Into Thin Air). But his own spiritual odyssey gets wearisome; his struggles with personal responsibility, alcoholism, and narcissism are so pervasive that the reader begins to wish for a less introspective narrator. Wise’s relationship to Tenzin (as Thurman is called by friends and family) is also much less interesting than Wise thinks it is. Valuable for its teaching and its setting, then, but marred by Wise’s self-preoccupation. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 9, 1999
ISBN: 0-553-10346-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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