An eclectic, spicy smorgasbord of philosophical food for thought.
Survival, love, and spiritual enlightenment are among the prizes we must seek, according to this lively treatise on the human predicament.
Smoley, the author of Inner Christianity (2002) and editor of Quest: Journal of the Theosophical Society of America, posits seven metaphorical “games” that depict prominent aspects of existence. The survival game is won by procuring basic needs, but these can be quite different, he notes, depending on whether you’re an English aristocrat or a homeless tunnel dweller in Las Vegas. Love is a game that’s usually transactional, Smoley contends, with lovers judging each other by “the Equation” of desirability, but the secret to love is “the perception of the unity of all being.” The power game can involve Machiavellian cunning—“it is never wise to underestimate the extent to which your subordinates can sabotage you”—or a numinous “power-from-within” that draws on a universal “life force.” The pleasure game motivates us in everything from oral sex to champagne connoisseurship, while the creativity game is an interplay between form and innovation in everything from classical architecture to the absurdly standardized rules of movie scripts, which requires that the big plot break occurs on page 25. Smoley celebrates the courage game through the deeds of warriors like Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson—an example whom some readers will find problematic—and he proposes “death in battle is like a famous ride in an amusement park—something not to be missed at one point or another in a sequence of earthly lifetimes.” Finally, the master game is the realm of rare souls who awaken to deeper wisdom, often through meditative exercises. Smoley’s pensées mix an acerbic realism, complete with advice on office politics, with a mystical and even occult sensibility; he is influenced by spiritualist G.I. Gurdjieff, cites astrology as a useful means of assessing romantic compatibility, and mentions a “strikingly and unexpectedly accurate” palm reading he received. The book has a free-wheeling curiosity and erudition, and it approaches profound questions in prose that’s lucid and entertainingly tart: “The lifelessness and superficiality of the current American literary novel cannot be because it has reached the technical limits of what is a very broad and accepting genre, but because, one senses, of some larger social vitiation: a masturbatory self-obsession has supplanted great themes and vistas.” The result is a stimulating read.
An eclectic, spicy smorgasbord of philosophical food for thought.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9781722506247
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Gildan Media
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.
Memories and life lessons inspired by the author’s mother, who was murdered in 2021.
“Neither my mother nor I knew that her last text to me would be the words ‘Think you’ll be happy,’ ” Avant writes, "but it is fitting that she left me with a mantra for resiliency.” The author, a filmmaker and former U.S. Ambassador to the Bahamas, begins her first book on the night she learned her mother, Jacqueline Avant, had been fatally shot during a home invasion. “One of my first thoughts,” she writes, “was, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me hate this man. Give me the strength not to hate him.’ ” Daughter of Clarence Avant, known as the “Black Godfather” due to his work as a pioneering music executive, the author describes growing up “in a house that had a revolving door of famous people,” from Ella Fitzgerald to Muhammad Ali. “I don’t take for granted anything I have achieved in my life as a Black American woman,” writes Avant. “And I recognize my unique upbringing…..I was taught to honor our past and pay forward our fruits.” The book, which is occasionally repetitive, includes tributes to her mother from figures like Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton, but the narrative core is the author’s direct, faith-based, unwaveringly positive messages to readers—e.g., “I don’t want to carry the sadness and anger I have toward the man who did this to my mother…so I’m worshiping God amid the worst storm imaginable”; "Success and feeling good are contagious. I’m all about positive contagious vibrations!” Avant frequently quotes Bible verses, and the bulk of the text reflects the spirit of her daily prayer “that everything is in divine order.” Imploring readers to practice proactive behavior, she writes, “We have to always find the blessing, to be the blessing.”
Some of Avant’s mantras are overstated, but her book is magnanimous, inspiring, and relentlessly optimistic.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2023
ISBN: 9780063304413
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperOne
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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
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