Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1510912 in Books
• Published on: 2003-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 1 pages

From Amazon.co.uk
Author of Ethical Ambition Derrick Bell is a constitutional lawyer currently teaching at NYU law school and is the author of seven books including the New York Times bestseller Faces at the Bottom of the Well. Ethical Ambition is a slim volume offering wise council on the matter of living a life of integrity and worth. Setting out six principles on which to live our lives Bell urges us to live a life of passion, to have the courage of our convictions, to rely on our loved ones and our faith for support, to have the humility to know when our best intentions go astray. It sounds like a book of ethical platitudes for the young written by a wise old paid-his-dues do-gooder with some interesting stories to tell. It is, but it is none the worse for that.

Bell has walked the walk in his own life as lawyer/activist in the NAACP but also in his academic life where he suffered the indignity of being stripped of his tenure and dismissed from Harvard for taking a principled stand. The really interesting parts of the book are Chapters 1, 3 and 6. The first is an unusual take on the notion of passion. The third is a fine example of what it means to have religious faith in the modern world—a world of science and technology-–without compromising one's intellectual integrity. Bell is a non-theistic progressive Christian reformer in the mould of John Shelby Sponge who also understands how and why the Christian myths were created in the first place and why it is time to get beyond theism. The final chapter is a disarming confession of his own failures as a social reformer, specifically it is a critique of the arrogance and self-righteousness of liberal lawyers losing touch with their community, with real-world politics, and the needs of those whose rights they believed themselves to be defending and upholding. More broadly it is a retrospective of the failures of liberalism in the late twentieth century. Overall, Ethical Ambition is easy, if not always comfortable, reading, with more than enough in it to keep the reader interested and on their ethical toes. --Larry Brown

From Library Journal
These three books take different approaches to the basic question, How can we live a meaningful life? To find an answer, Vanier (Becoming Human) turns to Aristotle, offering a detailed account of his views on the virtues. Vanier shows that Aristotle based his ethics on a cultivation of individual excellence that did not exclude the values of friendship and life in society. Vanier does not, however, wholly embrace Aristotle, arguing that his system was elitist and needs to be corrected by Christian compassion. Like Vanier, Kekes (The Examined Life) emphasizes the virtues, but his approach to the good life is pluralistic rather than Aristotelian. Arguing that no formalist doctrine such as Kant's can provide universally valid rules for leading a moral life, he instead maintains that the study of admirable individuals furnishes the guidelines we need. Among those Kekes finds worthy of emulation are Montaigne and Thomas More, who balanced public responsibilities with private commitments. Kekes offers a close analysis of their conduct, thereby hoping to convey a sense of how choosing a personal ideal is influenced by general moral constraints. Bell suggests a more personal way of addressing life's meaning, discussing incidents in his own life that may help others find an answer to this question. In particular, he stresses his need to subordinate personal ambition to the Civil Rights Movement. His principled stand involved him in several crucial conflicts, one of which led to his resignation from the faculty of Harvard Law School. (He is now a visiting professor at NYU.) Bell also presents insights on his friendship with women and on religion, again from a personal perspective. These three books are highly recommended for all public libraries.
David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., OH
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Bell, law professor and former civil rights lawyer, has repeatedly shown himself a model of principle and conscience. The first black tenured professor in the Harvard Law School, he endured personal sacrifice and criticism after taking a voluntary unpaid leave of absence to protest the school's failure to secure a woman of color in a tenured-track position. Bell provides substantial insight into his struggle to meet what he calls an ethical standard. He admits that an obsession with ambition, even in an altruistic sense, may violate the ethical obligations owed to family. He explores the conflicts of issues in his own religious traditions that he negotiates to reach a higher spiritual awareness often lost in traditional religions. Bell also cites examples of widely known ethically principled individuals--W. E. B. DuBois and Martin L. King Jr., among others--who often strove for higher ethical standards, alone and at great personal cost. His book offers great insight into how an individual seeks to live by the highest of personal standards and ideals. Vernon Ford
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