Thin compared to more closely focused works such as María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and...
Against the clash-of-civilizations model, prolific writer Karabell (Parting the Desert, 2003, etc.) reminds readers that there was a time when monotheisms coexisted in relative peace.
Peace is at the core of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, Karabell urges, even if the times seem to have summoned up a militant air, the West fearing fundamentalism, the Arab world imperialism. The scholarly and popular emphasis on visions of war, ethnic strife and inter-religious competition, Karabell suggests, will in time obscure the achievements of times past, when followers of the three religions found it congenial to live and work together. It’s to be noted that those arrangements flourished mostly when Muslims held power, in places such as the Baghdad of the golden age (which, Karabell allows, was “never quite as golden as it looked through the misty eyes of later generations”), the Jerusalem of Saladin, the Istanbul of the early Ottomans and, famously, the Córdoba of the Umayyads. “For a brief period,” writes Karabell, “Muslim Spain was the most vibrant place on earth.” Indeed, and even if the Ottomans’ treatment of Christians and Jews was non-discriminating largely in the sense that all the empire’s subjects were mere “instruments of the state and servants of the sultan,” Karabell’s case studies suggest that there is no good doctrinal reason we all just can’t get along. There are, of course, other reasons, ranging from old-fashioned ignorance to the attacks of 9/11 and the long human tradition of murdering one’s other-thinking neighbors. His curious conclusion is that a future zone of tolerance might look something like Dubai—another place, of course, where Muslims rule over non-Muslim minorities that have suddenly become the majority.
Thin compared to more closely focused works such as María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (2002).Pub Date: March 2, 2007
ISBN: 1-4000-4368-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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