I just bought this book "The Counsels of Cormac" an Ancient Guide to Irish Leadership (oh brother!) translated by Thomas Cleary. I should have bought the new biography on Lucrezia Borgia after reading this review.
"Cleary, a translator of Sun-Tzu’s leadership chestnut The Art of War, goes Gaelic with this ancient compendium of homiletic drivel. The text, attributed to the legendary high king of pagan Ireland, Cormac MacAirt, offers Cormac’s advice on character formation and is randomly interspersed with a motley of folk wisdom. Cormac’s thoughts on statesmanship and moral virtue tend toward unarguable but unactionable injunctions on the necessity of "Destroying every evil" and "Bringing about every good." He gets more specific when he turns to deportment ("Don’t be quarrelsome, so you don’t get your head broken"); weather interpretation ("snow is father to bacon/ wet is portent of feud"); health (a list of "What is worst for the human body" includes "heavy lifting," "dry food" and "swimming after eating one’s fill") and high society ("A sophisticate is liberal/ A satirist is poison/ Artistic women are sweet-mouthed"). Much of the material pertains to the king’s role in settling legal disputes, which seems to have given Cormac no end of headaches; his injunctions against "a flimsy, slow, prolix plea," "an empty, venting suit," the "seventeen characteristics of bad argumentation" and "swearing after judgment is pronounced" have the unmistakable tone of a weary jurist exasperated by bickering litigants. When it comes to business management, a few of Cormac’s thoughts—on the topics of corporate meetings ("arranging the seating" and "brevity of storytelling" are crucial) and outside consultants ("Don’t let an unlucky man be your chief adviser")—might be of interest to the Irish-American MBAs for whom this edition is obviously intended." |
