Lush, comprehensive scholarship aimed at a very limited academic readership.
The acclaimed author of The Name of the Rose (1980) and Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) returns with a deeply academic collection of previously published essays, speeches and a book review, all examining issues in semiotics, linguistics and medieval history.
Not for the faint of heart—or for those who neglected their homework in Latin or world history—this anthology is for scholars, philosophers, historians, linguists and semioticians. Novelist and literary critic Eco (Emeritus, Semiotics/Univ. of Bologna; The Prague Cemetery, 2011, etc.) has revised each of the pieces, and they retain their full academic regalia: parenthetical citations, long block quotations and dense footnotes. He begins with a discussion of the semantic differences between dictionaries and encyclopedias and then proceeds to a historical analysis of metaphor and a tracing of the philosophical use of the dog—and the barking dog—in the thinking of some heavyweights like Augustine, Abelard, Aquinas and Roger Bacon. Among the more interesting selections is one about how people in the Middle Ages viewed fakes and copies. Since they had few ways to determine authenticity, they were more accepting of them. Dante figures prominently in a number of the pieces. We learn that he accepted the biblical account of the variety of Earth’s languages, and Eco explains the notion that God perhaps gave Adam a sort of Chomsky-an universal grammar rather than an actual language—though he also acknowledges the long attempt to demonstrate that Hebrew was the language of Adam. Eco is generally generous to other scholars, but he does go after Benedetto Croce for a “lack of precision” and an “extremely limited familiarity with the arts.” Another engaging essay deals with what he calls “natural semiosis,” and he revisits and reaffirms some thoughts about Kant and the platypus.
Lush, comprehensive scholarship aimed at a very limited academic readership.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-674-04918-5
Page Count: 590
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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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