No blinding insights here, but rather a scaffolding of Freudian interpretation that feels highly provisional when not...
Tentative explorations into what it means to escape, from noted British psychoanalyst Phillips (The Beast in the Nursery, 1998, etc.).
Using aspects of Houdini’s life as a kind of refrain, and layering the escape-artist’s chapters with episodes from his own psychoanalytic practice, Phillips makes glancing forays into the complex world of flight. Contradictory, too, but that’s not much of an excuse when Phillips himself appears hopelessly muddled by his research. “People often feel most alive when escaping,” the author observes, although it “is often linked to a sense of failure.” He often strikes a passive, reactive note (“what we want is born of what we want to get away from”), and even his active voice is more than slightly obscure (“what one is escaping from is inextricable from, if not defined by, what one is escaping to”). Although Phillips provides some provocative ideas on guilt and avoidance (“the imaginative activity involved in flight can blind us to any knowledge of quite what it is we are escaping from”) and on Houdini’s role as a respected outlaw (his popularizing “of the iconography of what we now call sadomasochism” and his “tapping into a market for torture”), his theses are compromised by notions that simply don’t hold. “Things are not frightening because they are real, they are real because they are frightening” is a case in point. So is his assertion that “the pornographer works to avert the death of desire” and his bizarre declaration that “in this simple event—dangling, chained upside down, over 150 feet up—the traditional erotic story joined forces with the new economic story: you can make it if you work, if you’ve got something unique to sell.” What’s traditional about being chained and hanging upside down while suspended 150 feet in the air?
No blinding insights here, but rather a scaffolding of Freudian interpretation that feels highly provisional when not downright rickety.Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-40636-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
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
BOOK REVIEW
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.
Lessons about life from those preparing to die.
A longtime hospice chaplain, Egan (Fumbling: A Pilgrimage Tale of Love, Grief, and Spiritual Renewal on the Camino de Santiago, 2004) shares what she has learned through the stories of those nearing death. She notices that for every life, there are shared stories of heartbreak, pain, guilt, fear, and regret. “Every one of us will go through things that destroy our inner compass and pull meaning out from under us,” she writes. “Everyone who does not die young will go through some sort of spiritual crisis.” The author is also straightforward in noting that through her experiences with the brokenness of others, and in trying to assist in that brokenness, she has found healing for herself. Several years ago, during a C-section, Egan suffered a bad reaction to the anesthesia, leading to months of psychotic disorders and years of recovery. The experience left her with tremendous emotional pain and latent feelings of shame, regret, and anger. However, with each patient she helped, the author found herself better understanding her own past. Despite her role as a chaplain, Egan notes that she rarely discussed God or religious subjects with her patients. Mainly, when people could talk at all, they discussed their families, “because that is how we talk about God. That is how we talk about the meaning of our lives.” It is through families, Egan began to realize, that “we find meaning, and this is where our purpose becomes clear.” The author’s anecdotes are often thought-provoking combinations of sublime humor and tragic pathos. She is not afraid to point out times where she made mistakes, even downright failures, in the course of her work. However, the nature of her work means “living in the gray,” where right and wrong answers are often hard to identify.
A moving, heartfelt account of a hospice veteran.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59463-481-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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