In this stranger-than-fiction page-turner, investigative reporter Kaplan (Fires of the Dragon, 1992) and Andrews, Asia correspondent for British Esquire, pursue the apocalyptic Aum cult from its bizarre genesis and gestation to its notorious 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which killed 11 and wounded 5,500. The authors have done their homework in researching the breadth of the hidden activities of this strange cult, though they play on readers' fears by sensationalizing, for instance, Aum's attempts to acquire Russian nukes, based on rather skimpy evidence. Nevertheless, Aum Shinri Kyo (Aum Supreme Truth) has found its place in history as the first civilian-engineered chemical terrorism. The group's partially blind guru, Shoko Asahara began more as a megalomaniacal con artist, but his perverted mix of Buddhism, pseudoscience, and millennialism lured 40,000 from Japan, Russia, and elsewhere. Aum's beliefs entail rituals involving electrode caps, truth serum, and barbiturates, and methods akin to those of Jim Jones, Charles Manson, and the Mafia. Although Aum's financial structure resembled a Japanese keiretsu (corporate family), with 37 companies internationally under its control and a boasted $1 billion in assets, it also had interests in land and insurance fraud, medical scams, harassment, kidnapping, and murder. From their Mount Fuji stronghold, they experimented clumsily and unsuccessfully with botulism, anthrax, and various toxins until they hit on sarin, a Nazi-developed nerve gas. Their first sarin attack targeted some unsympathetic judges in a night assault that killed seven people, but it went unsolved by the police until Aum struck Tokyo's subways. Kaplan and Andrews dub Asahara ``the prophet of hi-tech terrorism,'' but aside from an afterword glossing the Senate's investigations on chemical weapons proliferation, their sensational account lacks a true object lesson. At the end of the Cold War and on the eve of the millennium, this docu-thriller about Aum's preparations for the end of the world makes for a fascinating, grim, near-unbelievable read.
Pub Date: July 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-517-70543-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
