Lamott always delivers flashes of wisdom and inspiration that resonate, particularly with her most devoted readers, but the...
A meditation on the benefits of discovering and extending mercy.
In her recent books, bestselling author Lamott (Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace, 2014, etc.) has increasingly delved into the challenges of finding and sustaining faith, especially when confronting incidences of misfortune or cruelty. Often drawing on her own experiences as a mother and devoted friend, her struggles with alcoholism, finding solace and sustenance by embracing Christianity, and embracing a sense of community, the author offers spiritually enhancing, life-affirming lessons, often punctuated with her signature wit and accessible wisdom. In examining the nature of what it means to be merciful, Lamott treads over a good deal of her inner landscape that will be familiar to her readers. As usual, her examples are loaded with references from pop culture, literature, and philosophy, but she draws most extensively from Scripture. The biblical stories serve to provide fuller dimension to the many forms in which mercy may present itself and reflect on the most awe-inspiring results. Lamott also touches on some extreme examples from our recent past—e.g., the relatives of the nine people gunned down at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston in 2015 speaking of forgiveness for the killer or teenage Tibetan nuns who were tortured in prison but later prayed for the Chinese guards who had held them captive. “When we manage a flash of mercy for someone we don’t like, especially a truly awful person, including ourselves,” writes the author, “we experience a great spiritual moment, a new point of view that can make us gasp. It gives us the chance to rediscover something both old and original, the sweet child in us who, all evidence to the contrary, was not killed off, but just put in the drawer.”
Lamott always delivers flashes of wisdom and inspiration that resonate, particularly with her most devoted readers, but the book is a somewhat opaque and redundant exercise that never quite feels grounded.Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7352-1358-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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