Well-researched, engaging stories struggling under the weight of cloying commentary.
A long walk, composed of short vignettes, through the career decisions of 50 professional Americans.
Inspired by his own feelings of confusion about hustling up work in the wake of thinning assignments, journalist and novelist Bronson (The Nudist on the Late Shift, 1999, etc.) hits the road to report on the state of people pursuing their dreams in the workplace. While considering his own career path, Bronson had a realization: “Nothing seemed more brave to me than facing up to one's own identity.” Accordingly, he has gone in pursuit of those courageous souls. We are introduced to an investment banker turned catfish farmer, a dancer turned PR executive, a TV writer who left Hollywood to return to his roots in Pittsburgh, an Olympic hopeful who gave it up to be a mother, and countless others, most of whom have intriguing work histories to relate. Just for variety, there’s even a professional who has had a single employer (NASA) since graduating from college more than a decade ago. The character who receives the most attention, however, is Bronson himself. The author is relentless in his efforts to insert his reactions to his subjects, both during and after the interviews. When an electric-car inventor becomes overly involved in home improvements and loses track of his own ambitions, the readers are capable of groaning inwardly all on their own; Bronson's report that “it hurt to learn this” is maddeningly extraneous. Certainly, such a project needs an organizing principle, but Bronson's freewheeling analysis and earnest assertions of respect for his subjects fail to engage, resulting in messy pastiche of oral history, sociology, and self-help.
Well-researched, engaging stories struggling under the weight of cloying commentary.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50749-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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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