An old-fashioned intellectual search for truth, “unwilling to settle for rumors, unexamined assumptions, urban myths, folk...
Weidhorn (English/Yeshiva University) conducts a survey of the state of knowledge in some non-scientific disciplines and reveals widespread uncertainty behind the mask of quotidian certitude.
The author radiates infectious, provocative fun as he makes the case for skepticism. He skirts applied science–explaining that he lacks any depth of familiarity in that arena (though the Scientific Revolution looms large here)–but rambunctiously engages “government propaganda and secrecy, corporate advertising and cheating, Pharisaic religiosity in the public square, sectarian rhetoric, partisan talking points, stockbrokers’ dubious recommendations, misuse of medicines and pharmaceutics, lawyerly sophistry”–all the suffocating lint of daily life. Given our imperfection and ignorance, he asks, how can we be absolutely sure about anything? In the absence of definitive evidence, aren’t statements about reality only theories? Weidhorn is a believer in suspending belief and disbelief, exercising doubt, living and letting live, neither expecting nor pining for resolution–but always thinking hard and openly. Skepticism is not the truth; it is merely less untenable than other philosophies purveying absolute truths. He presents a persuasive argument for “both/and” instead of “either/or.” He finds the metaphysical bases for egalitarianism and democracy in the scientific method and plays it off against the hierarchical structure of institutional religion. He states the more and less savory perspectives of conservatives and liberals, ponders benighted and enlightened selfishness, the uses and misuses of violence, the elusiveness of certainty in literature, the benefits (or not) of wine. Most readers will find argument with Weidhorn at some point–over the impossibility of socialism, perhaps, or whether “a person holding a completely singular idea, without a living or dead soulmate, is either insane or desperately insecure”–but the author offers a lively, thought-provoking journey.
An old-fashioned intellectual search for truth, “unwilling to settle for rumors, unexamined assumptions, urban myths, folk tales and tall tales, wish-fulfillment, flattery of self or tribe, propaganda, and just plain misunderstanding.”Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-40950-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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