Ten years later, a sequel to the runaway bestseller The Tao of Pooh. If you like marshmallow laced with arsenic, it was worth the wait. In the original, as you may recall, Hoff had an Idea: that Winnie-the-Pooh could be used to explain Taoism, the ancient Chinese way of balance. Now, as luck would have it, Pooh's buddy Piglet turns out to be the perfect embodiment of Te, the Taoist term for virtue, which is attained through sensitivity, modesty, and smallness. Piglet, you see, is a ``Very Small Animal'' (for all his talk about smallness, Hoff, like A.A. Milne, who must be groaning in his grave, likes capital letters Very Much), and the diminutive porker's adventures are the perfect means to preach, Very Lightly, about being positive and ecological and upright. The trick is to ``observe, deduce, apply''; once done, the millennial ``Day of Piglet'' will arrive and human beings will once again achieve ``the state of paradise that existed before the Great Separation occurred.'' Watch out, though: All is not summer in the 100-Acre Wood. Beneath the goofy grin one finds bared teeth, as Hoff snaps away peevishly at Confucianism (``authoritarian, No- Nonsense attitude toward life''), Christianity, feminism (``behind their antimasculine words, it's Overmasculinity as Usual''), Republicans, critics, computers—whatever raises his Taoist hackles. All in a Good Cause, of course. No doubt, The Ching of Eeyore comes next. Then what? Well, by then the Day of Piglet will have come, and the whole world will be a Trillion-Acre Wood...so empty your pockets while you can, and watch Piglet bring home the bacon. (Illustrated with 51 line drawings from the original Pooh books. However did they dare?)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-525-93496-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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