This is a beautifully mounted and exquisitely illustrated, learned expedition through the worlds of myth and dream. "Imagery, especially the imagery of dreams, is the basis of mythology." The illustrations range from Michelangelo and Blake to Van Gogh and Jackson Pollock; many of the photographs are in color and all are striking. The underlying psychology is Jungian, the Oriental discipline accompanying it is that of Yoga, and the intellectual conception throughout focuses on the interleaving of the nonliterate or primitive traditions with the highly literate and convoluted traditions of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. Joseph Campbell's concern with comparative religions has always been weighted in favor of the mystical elements inherent in any creed rather than the ethical or social values which are also a part of religious formulations. His mammoth Mythic Image naturally follows this familiar trajectory. The book is dazzling but frankly a bit difficult to follow if not to grasp. It has an air of academic psychedelia. Everything is forever flowing into everything else: the Gospel account of the Last Supper is related to the last meal of Buddha, a few lines from Wordsworth are juxtaposed against lines from the Chhandogya Upanishad. Or everything is being balanced by some opposite: "male and female, active and contemplative, light and dark." And there are so many variations on the theme of "unity in duality," so much talk of gods and fertility cults, cosmic wheels and cosmological views, the four elements and the four seasons, that the reader is soon lost in reverie. Not surprisingly, the most interesting writing doesn't come from Campbell at all, but is to be found in a long extract he presents from Captain Cook's eyewitness account of a bloody sacrifice in the South Seas. Much thought and preparation went into this laudable undertaking; unfortunately it never quite reaches the level of significance its subject warrants.
Pub Date: April 1, 1975
ISBN: 0691018391
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975
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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