An invigorating, tremendous work of scholarship.
A smart and entertaining “biography” of Socrates as shaped against the great experiment of democracy in 5th-century BCE Athens.
British historian and journalist Hughes (Helen of Troy, 2005) again seizes an elusive subject and fleshes it out by depicting the world around it. In this case, the Athenian philosopher who never wrote a word of his own springs to life through the work of his contemporaries (Plato, Aristophanes, Xenophon) and the record of his trial and death by hemlock poison for not acknowledging the city’s gods and for corrupting the youth. Socrates lived during the Golden Age of a virile, proud Athens, in which the spirit of open inquiry, justice and civic participation flourished among the common people, the demos. Unaffiliated with any school and content to roam barefoot and simply clad through Athens’s Agora engaging people in dialogue about how man could best lead a virtuous life, Socrates presented his listeners, often impressionable young men, with a moral challenge: What is the point of wealth if you are not happy? What is beauty? Who deserves power? Above all, Socrates goaded his followers to look deeper and to ask questions—a powerful and increasingly dangerous message in a new democracy that would soon be torn apart by plague, the Peloponnesian War and the rule of tyrants. Hughes thrillingly navigates the life stages of her subject. The young son of humble people, born just as Athens was constructing its Acropolis and Pericles came to glory, Socrates sowed his wild oats among the prostitutes in the city’s Kerameikos red-light district, enjoyed early association as a soldier with the beautiful Alcibiades and frequented the gyms to admire and engage the young men. Love, truth, virtue, the place of women—these were the preoccupations for the wandering sage, but the city had darkened, and Socrates was put on trial as a way of, as Aristotle wrote, “cutting the tops of the tallest ears of corn.”
An invigorating, tremendous work of scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4179-4
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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