It’d be lovely to read a more fully fleshed-out family reminiscence, but this is a disappointment.
How do we mix ancient wisdom and modern technology? The author of Eve's Apple (1997) and former culture editor of the Forward seeks an answer.
When his elderly maternal grandmother died, Rosen began a self-questioning journey into the Talmud, the 2,000-year-old collection of commentaries and other texts assembled by the brilliant rabbis of the Second Commonwealth era of Jewish history. Rosen reflects on that search and on the two streams of Jewish history embodied in his two grandmothers: one American-born and raised, a defiantly unreligious woman but also a believer in God; the other East European, Orthodox, murdered by the Nazis. In the same way, Rosen believes, the dialectic of his very modern American maternal grandmother counterpoised to his no less traditional European paternal grandmother is enunciated in the contradictions between the "ancient tradition and contemporary chaos" as represented by the book's title. The crux of his odyssey is an attempt to unite and embrace the contradictions inherent in these seeming polar opposites. The result is a slender volume that drifts from Homer to Henry Adams to Josephus, trying to find a thread in Jewish and American history that will allow Rosen to reconcile the poles. Rosen writes quite well. The book is full of handsomely crafted passages that yearn to be read aloud. But the connections he makes are tenuous, forced, and arbitrary. The Talmud and the Internet are both collections of seemingly random scraps; granted, but united to what purpose? A Web page and a page of Talmud are both jigsaw-like constructions, palimpsests built around intricately interlocking commentaries—but so what? Regrettably, the results are aesthetically pleasing but intellectually facile and attenuated.
It’d be lovely to read a more fully fleshed-out family reminiscence, but this is a disappointment.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-27238-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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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