Slim but pointed and humorous; a good gift for the neighbor’s kid’s graduation.
Two of the literary world’s most entertaining lighthearted cynics collaborate on a brief text that takes the form of a fake graduation speech.
“It’s pretty fucked up,” writes Hiaasen (Razor Girl, 2016, etc.) early on in the speech, referring to the “real world” that his imaginary graduates are preparing to enter. Accompanied by apt illustrations from New Yorker illustrator Chast (Going into Town: A Love Letter to New York, 2017, etc.), winner of the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award, this speech runs through a litany of life’s challenges and obstacles and how to overcome them (“lowering your expectations will inoculate you against serial disappointment”) followed by a shorter closing section in which Hiaasen turns more hopeful. After all, he does want his readers to experience happiness, but happiness is “slippery. It’s unpredictable. It’s a different sensation for everyone.” A good portion of the text discusses our highly divisive society and the prevalence of stupidity—or, more accurately, willful ignorance. Hiaasen is quick to point out that society as a whole may not be dumber than when he graduated college in 1974, but the social and cultural landscape is vastly different. “Society has been deeply divided before,” he writes, “but never has it been so inanely distracted. Don’t be shocked if more Americans can identify all the Kardashian sisters than can find Serbia on a world map.” Global geography aside, there’s no question that technology has shifted our gaze and often warped our perceptions of each other, and the text and illustrations here serve as a quick, amusing snapshot of that situation. Thankfully, underneath all the despair and snark—social media is “a geyser of ominous evidence that our species has begun to de-evolve, receding back to the slime bog from which we first emerged”—are glimmers of optimism, as in most of the work from both Hiaasen and Chast. “One thing happiness is not,” writes Hiaasen, “is overrated.”
Slim but pointed and humorous; a good gift for the neighbor’s kid’s graduation.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-65501-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2018
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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