An informative book that inspires readers toward their authentic selves.
Can a person try to be authentic?
Contrary to its popular characterization, existentialism has never been a philosophy of darkness and despair. Its preoccupation with death is better understood as the background that enables a passionate embrace of life. What, after all, is more life-affirming than the notion that a person can, within certain limits, make of herself what she will—that we can all be, in Simone de Beauvoir’s phrase, “poets of our own lives”? As in her previous books Existentialism and Romantic Love and How To Live a Good Life, philosopher Cleary investigates existentialism as part of a long tradition of individual empowerment. Centered around the life and writings of Beauvoir, Cleary’s latest offers life advice so practical that at times it can be difficult to tell the philosophical from the common-sensical. What Cleary and Beauvoir ask us to do is, first, acknowledge facticity—that is, the givens of our life (where and when we were born, and so on)—and, second, exercise our freedom to take responsibility for everything else: who we are and what we do. The challenges lie in the application of this framework. In chapters devoted to marriage, aging, death, and the like, Cleary shows what it entails to take Beauvoir seriously. Some of the most moving passages in the book involve the author assessing her own life in these terms. In the chapter on self-sabotage, she describes turning “down being a guest on an important podcast because I’m afraid I won’t know what to say, or the words won’t come to me, or I’ll forget important points, or I’ll just sound stupid.” How refreshing to read a philosopher who achieves such vulnerability. Critical readers may object to Cleary’s overly broad conception of facticity and her superhero-strong sense of agency, but if they are wise, they will note these objections and then proceed to the business of taking good advice where they find it.
An informative book that inspires readers toward their authentic selves.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-250-27135-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Review Posted Online: March 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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