by Anita Katherine Dennis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 20, 2014
A cleareyed memoir about navigating fraught relationships and other cultures.
In her memoir, Dennis (Slaves to Racism, 2008) describes falling in love with the son of a Liberian tribal chief.
As a freshman college student, Dennis naively asked her anthropology professor, “Do they have newspapers in Africa?” As the son of a tribal chief in Liberia with an international background and sweet temperament, Benjamin Dennis answered her question without condescension and formed a close bond with his young pupil, which quickly led to romance. Family, race, and religion all worked to keep the two apart, but after moving to New York and meeting the ideal German Lutheran candidate for an “everyday marriage in a white community,” Dennis realized what she wanted and married her former professor. After they had their first child, the author split her life between visiting with Ben’s people in the remote Vahun village of Liberia’s Upcountry and being a working mother in southern Ohio and Flint, Michigan. Dennis outlines her life-changing relationship, adjustments to a foreign country, retirement, and religious faith. Although she acknowledges Liberia’s volatile political situation and racial tensions in the U.S., her husband’s status as foreign royalty made her experiences feel sheltered in comparison to those in other works about interracial marriage or unstable African nations. She writes at one point that the ramifications of racism “weren’t personal, since I married a black foreigner rather than an American black.” Her first trip to tribal Africa is also filled with “a round of parties, receptions, and social affairs with government dignitaries.” Despite this occasional insulation from Liberia’s turbulence, Dennis led a life filled with remarkable events and translated them into an entertaining memoir. Her confusing tendency to introduce chapters with the mention of new occurrences before providing context interrupts the story’s flow, but overall she proves to be a storyteller with a keen eye for detail and fully re-creates the complexities of her marriage and the exciting challenges she faced in Africa.
A cleareyed memoir about navigating fraught relationships and other cultures.Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2014
ISBN: 978-1490859576
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
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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