by Chris Grosso ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2014
It’s an artifice, sure, but compared to nonsense like The Secret, indie spiritualism has a lot going for it—maybe even some...
In a mixed bag of introspective insights and navel-gazing, Grosso tells the story of how he finally entered recovery after years of drug and alcohol abuse, which set him on the path of investigating his spiritual side far outside of organized religion.
It’s a bit like mid-1990s MTV meets New-Age mysticism, and they have a tattooed hipster baby. To give the author credit, it sounds like he was truly messed up before he got his act together, and his explorations may appeal to Daily Show viewers who feel like they need a shot of new-time religion. The book is composed of short, easily consumed chapters kicked off with quotes from usual suspects like Hunter S. Thompson, Aldous Huxley and Charles Bukowski and carrying titles like “The Tao of Checking Yourself” and “Jesus, Hitler, Bieber, Slayer & God.” It’s a collection that’s likely to cause mixed reactions, much like the work of journalist Neal Pollack, who retired from his own celebrated superstardom to study yoga—at which Grosso makes a few good-natured swipes (the yoga, not Pollack). There are good moments, like the way Grosso describes reaching a state of meditative bliss during an Eddie Van Halen guitar solo. How you feel about the pseudo-advice in lines like, “You were born to be real, not to be perfect,” will probably depend on your own spiritual sense of well-being at the time, though more cynical readers are likely to raise an eyebrow or two here and there. That’s even truer of Grosso’s postmodern experiences, littered with self-promotional links, like discovering the meaning of life while scrolling Facebook. For the record, the meaning of life is “Be cool” and “Don’t be an asshole.”
It’s an artifice, sure, but compared to nonsense like The Secret, indie spiritualism has a lot going for it—maybe even some actual sincerity.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58270-462-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Beyond Words/Atria
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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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 Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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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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