The sympathetic portraits Wilcox (Waiting for an Army to Die, 1983) paints of the Plowshares members are as flowery as the Volkswagens they drove in the 1960's, but do offer a glimpse into the hears of those on the cutting edge of the religious antinuclear movement. Wilcox profiles brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan and lesser-known members of the Plowshares movement, named after the biblical command to ``beat swords into plowshares.'' He lays out their religious beliefs, their family histories, and their prior work in social-justice issues to explain how they came to risk long prison terms to ``symbolically disarm'' nuclear hardware. For Lin Romano—a housing advocate who once seized a priest's microphone and pleaded (unsuccessfully) with parishioners to allow the homeless to sleep inside the church during a cold snap, the decision to break into the Willow Grove Navel Air Station and pour her own blood over the controls of a P-3 Orion aircraft— came from a growing desire to ``resist the very root of the evil.'' Wilcox often extrapolates from historical record to include statements that academics might have made if they had been allowed to testify for the Plowshare defendants; hypothetical trivial-pursuit cards about the movement; and an eerie description of what would have happened if one of the protesters had been shot while climbing the fence into Willow Grove. Wilcox's tribute would have been more successful had he stuck to the activists' own cogent explanations of why they resist the ``false worship of nuclear weapons,'' and omitted his own rather odd interpretations.
Pub Date: May 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-201-52231-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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