Journalist Whitney (Whose Life? A Balanced, Comprehensive View of Abortion from Its Historical Context to the Current Debate, 1991, etc.) returns here to her Catholic schoolgirl roots in a work mingling autobiography and ethnography. After her father’s death, she traveled back to the Seattle area for his funeral and made the inevitable trek up to Rosary Heights, a motherhouse run by the same order (even the same nuns) that had trained her as a child. Whitney chooses to interview these nuns for her book, making her research effort an intensely personal journey. Like many other Catholic baby boomers, Whitney had left the Church in her late teens, turned off by its authoritarianism and its apparent oppression of women, only to begin craving a deeper spirituality in midlife. (In particular, her detailed descriptions of pre-Vatican II parochial school will elicit many shared memories from Catholics of her generation.) But in contrast to other “growing up Catholic” tales, this one is almost obsequiously respectful: Whitney’s parents are shown as devout and loving working-class saints, and the nuns are always benevolent, if strict. The author remains conscious that the nuns, who appear very constrained by Catholic patriarchy, continue nonetheless to negotiate powerful spaces for themselves within the patriarchy. She is fascinated by their covert but palpable feminism. Whitney allows the nuns’ stories of their callings, convent lives, and occasional deconversions to intermingle in their diversity; she draws a portrait of complex, engaging, and committed women. Throughout, however, there’s the sense that in seeking out these contemporary nuns, Whitney was already nostalgic about them as a thing of the past; the average age in the order is 55, and there are hardly any new converts. So she writes wistfully, as if chronicling an endangered species. Oversweet at times, but thoughtful and well written.
Pub Date: March 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-517-70854-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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