The decade-long correspondence (195868) of writer/monk Merton and Milosz, Polish poet and winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature. By 1958, Merton had spent 17 years in one of the strictest contemplative orders of the Catholic Church but had paradoxically achieved world fame through his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, and his subsequent books on monasticism and contemporary spiritual life. Milosz was living with his family near Paris, disgusted both by Communist Poland and by what he saw as the political posturing of Sartre and Picasso. This correspondence, which was initiated by Merton as a result of reading Milosz's famous critique of Communism, The Captive Mind, covers the controversial final years of Merton's life, when he modified his otherworldly stance and became increasingly involved in the peace movement, and his longstanding fascination with Buddhism. The letters show both men struggling for a meaning beyond the clichÇs and spiritual drought imposed by society in the name of Soviet atheism or of an America trivialized by the media. Milosz calls on Merton's status as a writer who can make a difference, urging him to speak out against the banalities of commercial television and to adopt a more Manichean outlook, in the manner of Camus or Simone Weil. We relish Milosz's brief but searching analyses of Russia's self-image and of Polish Catholicism, not to mention his excoriation of the new vernacular Mass as a concession to boy- scoutish cheerfulness. Surprisingly, Merton claims scant sympathy with the student protests at Berkeley, where Milosz had settled, and imagines that his Zen may not be theirs. It is refreshing to see Merton in his intellectual mode, writing without thought of his public. Art, religion, the Cold War, and a host of contemporary writers flit elegantly through these letters of friends who hardly ever saw each other, yet achieved a remarkable meeting of minds.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-374-27100-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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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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