How to Be Bad

By David Bowker

Book Overview

The Tao Te Ching or Book of the Way of Virtue is a touchstone of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. It has been called the wisest book ever written, and its author, Lao Tzu, is known as the Great Archivist. Shakespeare, the Bard, was the West s greatest writer and even invented human nature, according to some. The Tao and the Bard is the delightful conversation between these two unlikely spokesmen, who take part in a free exchange of views in its pages. Here, in his own words, Lao Tzu offers the eighty-one verses that comprise the Tao, and, responding to each verse, the Bard answers with quotations from his plays and poems. In sometimes surprising ways, Shakespeare s words speak to Lao Tzu s, as the two trade observations on good and evil, love and virtue, wise fools and foolish wisdom, and being and the nothing from which all things are born. Here is a new take on an old dialogue between East and West, with the reader invited to take part whether to parse the meanings closely or sit back and enjoy the entertainment.Lao Tzu: Is the world unkind?/Nature burns up life like a straw dog.Skakespeare: Allow not nature more than nature needs, /Man s life is as cheap as beasts . . . (Lear, King Lear)Lao Tzu: Tao is elusive./Looking you never see, /listening you never hear, /grasping you never hold.Shakespeare: The eye sees not itself/But by reflection, by some other things. (Brutus, Julius Caesar)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312328265
• ISBN13: 9780312328269
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Griffin
• Length: 244 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

pretty good

yeah it waz a pretty good book....kina crazy...u swhould buy it!!!

How to be REALLY BAD

A very sick fellow is Rawhead but in his own way he has a conscience and follows a code of ethics. Unfortunately, this code does not preclude excessive loss of life for those around him and it is the unfortunate soul who ends up being a "friend". Once you are a friend of Rawhead's, your life (and the lives of those around you) will never be the same. Very funny, slightly two dimensional characters, but quite entertaining and, I suspect, captures the criminal mindset extremely well.

wild thriller

In Richmond on the Thames, twenty-something Mark Madden owns a bookstore that sells rare books. After the "Son of God" destroys a "dirty" book, he gets into an incident in the nearby park resulting in a wacko punching him in the forehead. The EMTs take him to the hospital where the cops react the same way as they did with the burned book insisting he is lucky to still breathe. At the hospital Caro Sewell sits down next to Mark; she was his girlfriend for six months when he was eighteen until she dumped him to blow a teacher. Caro admits she owes him eighteen months as every two years she reinvents herself and drops her boyfriend. To his shame the mousy Mark still wants her and loves her. Caro teases him about his anal lists that he draws up on nonsensical subjects, but also offers him a test of his love for her. She draws up a list: 1) father; 2) Warren; and 3) Jesus. If he kills the trio she will give him the year and half he did not have with her that she owes him. Although he fears prison he is obsessed with Caro, will Mark go mad with or without her? This is a wild thriller that stars a strange lead couple. Readers will keep on going in one sitting to learn whether Mad Mark Madden will choose love and death or the collective safe route. Fans will believe his choice and his follow-up as David Bowker leaves his audience pondering how bad someone can become if the price is right. Harriet Klausner