A mixture of sincerity, sensationalism and irony that alternately delights, informs and annoys.
A peripatetic journalist and the author of The Geography of Bliss (2008) jets around the globe trying to find a religion that makes sense for him.
Born a Jew (but no longer observing), Weiner received a recent medical scare and was startled by a nurse’s question: “Have you found your God yet?” That question propelled the author in his search through a tiny fraction of the world’s religions. Some of the groups he chose—Wiccans and Raelians, for example, the latter a UFO-based religion whose Las Vegas convention Weiner attended—seem choices based more on whimsy and sensationalism than a sincere response to the nurse’s question. Still, Weiner is often an appealing tour guide, complaining throughout about the quality of the coffee, making fun of his efforts to whirl like a dervish, chiding himself for his inability to meditate, recording his fears when he walked down a city street or met a Wiccan named Black Cat and telling how he sneaked out of sessions for a drink. Weiner also samples some more conventional religions, like Buddhism and Taoism, and he lived with some Franciscans at a shelter in the South Bronx. The author even explores shamanism at a remote Maryland location, though he confesses a discomfort with polytheism. Weiner ends his quest in Israel, where he studied Kabbalah with a variety of teachers. The author’s conclusion—find what works for you—is hardly novel, and the tone and diction are informal and self-deprecating but sometimes clichéd.
A mixture of sincerity, sensationalism and irony that alternately delights, informs and annoys.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-446-53947-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
This a book of earlier, philosophical essays concerned with the essential "absurdity" of life and the concept that- to overcome the strong tendency to suicide in every thoughtful man-one must accept life on its own terms with its values of revolt, liberty and passion. A dreary thesis- derived from and distorting the beliefs of the founders of existentialism, Jaspers, Heldegger and Kierkegaard, etc., the point of view seems peculiarly outmoded. It is based on the experience of war and the resistance, liberally laced with Andre Gide's excessive intellectualism. The younger existentialists such as Sartre and Camus, with their gift for the terse novel or intense drama, seem to have omitted from their philosophy all the deep religiosity which permeates the work of the great existentialist thinkers. This contributes to a basic lack of vitality in themselves, in these essays, and ten years after the war Camus seems unaware that the life force has healed old wounds... Largely for avant garde aesthetes and his special coterie.
Pub Date: Sept. 26, 1955
ISBN: 0679733736
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1955
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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