A deep-running meditation on reaching for the sublime despite obstacles.
Environmental advocate and nature writer Williams (Environmental Humanities/Univ. of Utah; The Open Space of Democracy, 2004, etc.) celebrates the “beauty of being brought together.”
Tesserae, the cut stone and glass and enamel used in making mosaics, usher in her leitmotif: that it is elemental to human nature and a measure of our compassion to recompose a unity that has been shattered. “I believe in the beauty of all things broken,” she writes, and mosaics provide a clear-cut example as she describes her apprenticeship in a mosaic workshop in Ravenna, Italy, where she found that “a spiritual history of evolving pagan and Christian perspectives can be read in a dazzling narrative of cut stones and glass.” Her other two instances of something broken are more oblique: the threatened prairie dog and violence in Rwanda. Prairie dogs are not charismatic animals like whales or wolves, especially not to golf-course managers and housing developers, and thus they test the range of human awareness and our remove from the basic rights of existence and commonwealth. Observing a prairie-dog clan, she immersed herself in their community. Her sentences are short, staccato, often incantatory, and arranged just so on the page (a mosaic of words). Williams stumbles a bit when trying to apply to humans her contention that “there is a perfection in imperfection,” as she witnessed in mosaics. It certainly doesn’t apply to those who committed genocide in Rwanda, where the author ventured as a scribe for a team building a memorial to the victims. Knitting together the Hutus and Tutsis will take a long time, she acknowledges, but she now shares beauty and community with her adopted Rwandan son.
A deep-running meditation on reaching for the sublime despite obstacles.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-42078-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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