Writing entertainingly and casually, Robinson tells tales out of school that are guaranteed to tick off his fellow...
Water-bottle gossip mixes with big-picture philosophizing in this sharp memoir by a Republican Party stalwart—and onetime insider.
Robinson (Snapshots From Hell, 1994), one of the young conservatives who gave Dartmouth administrators fits in the early 1980s and went on to serve as a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and George Bush, is as faithful a Republican as they come. He defends his choice of political persuasions on many grounds: his was, after all, the party of Lincoln, the party of federalism and industrial democracy, the party that he believes best honors the American desire to be left alone to grow rich, fat, and happy. That said, Robinson finds much for which to fault his partisans: "It is easy," he writes, "to find the Republican Party absurd. . . . At times I find myself imaging that the GOP represents the past, its members the last remnants of an America that was once overwhelmingly white and Protestant." Likening his passion for the GOP to a love affair with a slightly dangerous, slightly daft woman—perhaps a silly conceit, but one that works just fine for his purposes—Robinson writes openly of his fellow believers' hidebound sexist and racist tendencies ("The GOP has done almost nothing to appeal to African-Americans or single women, while its efforts to deal with the growing Hispanic population have so far proven perverse"), exposing major flaws of belief and practice on every page. But his gadfly criticism notwithstanding, Robinson argues that the GOP is in every respect preferable to the chief alternative, and he plumps for George W. Bush while acknowledging the attractiveness of John McCain (who, for the Republican Old Guard, appears to be more dangerous than any Democrat).
Writing entertainingly and casually, Robinson tells tales out of school that are guaranteed to tick off his fellow Republicans and delight their foes in this election year. But make no mistake, he's hanging on to his party card.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2000
ISBN: 0-446-52665-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2000
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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