At the hands of noted French philosopher Revel (Democracy Against Itself: The Fate of the Democratic Impulse, 1993, etc.) and his son, a Tibetan monk, Ricard (Journey to Enlightenment, not reviewed), the age-old debate between reason and faith receives an intriguing twist: Western norms of thinking confront Eastern concepts of spiritual experience. As a young man, Ricard left a promising career in biology to pursue a deeper wisdom under the tutelage of Tibetan monks exiled in India, including the Dalai Lama. And so the two, with their strikingly divergent paths (the father remains a child of the skeptical French Enlightenment, and the son is now learned in the ways of Buddhist enlightenment), met first in Nepal and then in Brittany to collaborate on this written dialogue, which contrasts Buddhist and European philosophy, science, psychology, ethics, political theory, and spirituality. The dramatic movement of the discussions is purely intellectual—the personal lives of the authors and the natural beauty that surrounded them as they talked in Nepal and France are muted—and centers largely on Revel, who draws parallels between Buddhist and Western philosophy, learns that Buddhism is more activist than he had thought, and, while doubting Buddhist metaphysics, comes to appreciate how suitably it fills the vacuum left by what he deems the now defunct traditions of Western moral philosophy. Ricard supplies an able introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, though, as he astutely implies at the end, the form the book takes—of logical argument—mediates his father’s didactic skepticism more successfully than his own Buddhist compassion, which comes out sounding overly moralistic at times. Newcomers to Buddhism should note that, while Ricard acknowledges the range of Buddhisms, he does not always flag as such his own distinctly Mahayana teachings—as, for example, on the universal Buddha-nature. From the ever philosophical French, a rare public display of abstract ideas in lively motion. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1999
ISBN: 0-8052-4162-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Schocken
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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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