Review by Booklist Review
Lewis offers the contemporary reader a well-organized overview of the ways in which Americans choose their values. He includes in his perspective systems of values based on authority, logic, and science and balances these against those that follow emotion, intuition, and sensory experience. The value of the book, however, lies in its practical observation that these are not locked systems and that people may use two or more in their personal decision-making. Lewis provides examples of such cross-fertilization and then talks briefly about teaching values in the classroom. This book is recommended for both professional and lay readers. Appendixes and bibliography. --Mary Deeley
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Library Journal Review
Proposing a framework for defining and evaluating personal value systems based on various perceptions of truth, Lewis isolates six characteristic systems grounded in authority, deductive logic, science, sense experience, intuition, and emotion. Rather than analyzing how or why individuals favor one particular style, Lewis attempts to examine these systems as they occur in observations of individuals and society. He is careful to point out that no single category necessarily applies to each individual: most have ``cross-fertilized'' a number of styles. A good primer on personal ethics and values that includes classroom notes for further discussion.-- Jean Keleher, Wally Findlay Galleries, Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The gospel according to Lewis begins accessibly enough by postulating six ""modes of moral reasoning""--having to do with authority, logic, sense experience, emotion, intuition, and science--but this is no pocket ethics: Lewis has a whole syllabus, if not a hidden agenda. By way of ""elucidating"" the value systems, first individually and then in myriad hybrid incarnations, Lewis parades extravagantly erudite anecdotal illustrations, sometimes bafflingly chosen and idiosyncratically proportioned (e.g., a reductive section on Freudian psychology becomes a three-page forum for the schematic defense-theory of one George Vaillant). The book culminates in a sweeping crash course (capsule descriptions and exemplary citations) in moral philosophy (logical naturalism, logical in. tuitionism, logical/emotive Jacohinism, and more); the humanities (semiotics, deconstructionism, and mote); and political science (capitalism, mandarinism, etc., and--characteristically--not just agrarianism but populist agrarianism, technocratic agrarianism, etc.). Throughout, Lewis, a national business consultant and coauthor of The Real World War (1982), a book about global trade, proceeds with what one of his favorites, John Maynard Keynes (quoted on G.E. Moore), calls the ""appearance of. . . undoubting conviction and. . .the accents of infallibility."" One man's tour de force is another man's exhibitionism. Not everyone will have Lewis' cerebral stamina and tolerence for internal debate. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
