In the weeks before his death, Sartre and long-time personal secy Benny Levy recorded a series of discussions, in the form of interviews, some of which were published in a Paris weekly newspaper. Levy, a former Maoist student leader (for the contemporary American student, Maoist student leader is probably as archaic or unknown a term as internal combustion engine) & ardent student of Sartre, fairly attacked the blind & aging writer/philosopher, at times engaging him, at times bullying him.

Thruout the interviews (which take up, really, just one-fourth of the entire book [hence 3 stars]; the rest is all intro commentary & postscripts), Sartre seemed to hold his own, citing the errors of Marxism, existentialism, & the left-wing political movements of the 60s & early 70s. I think the interviews offer the reader a good feel for that period (fondly known in the USA as "the 60s"), when Levy was known as Pierre Victor, Sartre was backing all kinds of radical & left-wing endeavors, & the 1968 student rebellions thruout Europe but especially in Paris threatened to topple the whole knowledge-is-power façade.

In the end, the students failed, but the student uprisings in the USA, then & after, were a mere burlesque of those in Europe: certainly, the knowledge-is-power concept was never questioned (US students just wanted more power with their knowledge), & the smugness that allows Mr. Aronson to pose questions dispassionately has enveloped every succeeding academic iteration.

The famous quote from Sartre's one-act play, "No Exit," was "Hell is other people." Sartre was almost 75 when these interviews took place, and then he said, "It's other people that are my old age...Old age is a reality that is mine but that others feel..." The topics that disturbed so many after the interviews were published were Judaism and Jewishness.

Levy generalizes that Jews fear the revolutionary mob because it may become the pogrom mob; Sartre counters that "there were a considerable number of Jews in the Communist Party in 1917 [in Russia]." Personally, I am at a loss to explain why Levy was reviled by Sartre scholars: Sartre states that he was profoundly influenced by the "Jewish reality" that confronted him after the war, when he met Jews that he saw as having a destiny "beyond the ravages [of] anti-Semitism."

Hope Now seems to me to be more of a coda to the 1972 documentary, "Sartre: By Himself," where he chatted amiably with the editorial staff of Le Temps Moderne and Simone de Beauvoir. That film depicted a leisurely afternoon with friends. Sartre with Levy seems more like colleagues at work. Unlike the current crop of celebrity academics, Sartre always appeared, to appropriate Harry Stack Sullivan's comment about schizophrenics, "simply human."

The longest section of the book deals with the LSAT. The advice in this section mirrors what you would read when you register with the Law School Admission Council -- when the LSAT is administered, when you should take it, how to prepare, etc.

The most helpful section in this book discusses the value of volunteering during college, or doing internships with the local attorney's office. However, you can read this section at the library in less than 15 minutes.

I do not recommend buying this book. If you are really curious about its contents, just go to your library and check it out.

As a statement of Western atheism, it is clear and to the point. As a world view it is plagued by internal inconsistencies and numerous disconnections with objective reality--too many to cover properly here. Let me just indicate a few philosophical problems. The documents' premise that the universe has always existed is extremely difficult to defend given Big Bang cosmology, which points to an absolute origination. Unless everything came from nothing without a cause, this implies a Creator. Second, the documents claim that morality is relative to cultures and not absolute, yet they also go on to affirm various moral imperatives that they claim should obtain cross-culturally and absolutely, such as the need for world peace, the importance of rational inquiry, and so on. This is logically inconsistent. For a solid critique of the world view of naturalism, see James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door, 3rd edition, chapter four, "The Silence of Finite Space" and chapter five, "Zero Point: Nihilism." His thesis is that naturalism logically leads to Nihilism, which is unlivable and incongruous with our deeper intuitions about life and meaning. I agree.

The same folks have just recently put out Humanist Manifesto 2000, also written by Paul Kurtz.

The Humanists represented in all the above reject postmodernism, which dispenses with normative notions of rationality and the concept of objective truth. In this sense, the documents are modernist, and attempt to hold the line against the nihilism of postmodernist. For a discussion of this see my book, Truth Decay (InterVarsity Press, 2000), chapter two.

Douglas Groothuis, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary, Denver, Colorado, USA, Email: Doug.Groothuis@densem.edu