The book might provide more inspiration to fellow alcoholics than it will add to the scholarship on three figures of various...
A former religion reporter details the occasionally intersecting lives of three spiritual seekers in order to tell the story that compels him more, a personal account of addiction, recovery and sobriety.
“Aldous Huxley, Gerald Heard, and Bill Wilson set the stage for the spiritual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s,” writes the author of the “famous writer,” “forgotten philosopher” and “hopeless drunk” of his subtitle. “They distilled the spirits of organized religion into a powerful new blend that would help change the way Americans practice their faith and live their lives.” Though Lattin (The Harvard Psychedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith, and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America, 2010) maintains an engaging, conversational tone as he meanders through the lives of these three, their selection might seem arbitrary, with Heard seemingly the odd man out. Even if one accepts his influence on The Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions, written by Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, the reader might agree with one contemporary who says, “There was something not quite right about Gerald Heard.” The increasingly mystic and ascetic philosopher meditated six hours a day, practiced celibacy while advising married couples to stop having relations, and retreated from contact with formerly close friends such as Huxley. As for Wilson, who published pieces by both of the other two in his AA Grapevine publication, he was an early advocate of LSD who remained addicted to sex and tobacco, and he howled for whiskey on his deathbed. The key figure in this “blend of memoir and biography” is Lattin, whose narrative arc might be the strangest. He somehow balanced his religion reportage with a descent into cocaine addiction and alcoholism, and he sees this book as a crucial element in his ongoing sobriety (five years now), even though some may feel it violates the anonymity precept of AA. “One of the things I learned from AA is that many of us drink in an effort to quench a religious thirst,” he writes. “It’s how we get some temporary relief from the spiritual emptiness.”
The book might provide more inspiration to fellow alcoholics than it will add to the scholarship on three figures of various accomplishment and renown.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-520-27232-3
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, challenging work of ``bottom-up'' history that gives a voice to the unlettered and the disempowered. Blackbourn (History/Harvard) transforms an apparently minor historical curiosity, an instance at best of religious pathology, into a fascinating, surprising, and moving picture of cultural turmoil in the new German nation-state. The event in question is the alleged visitation of the Virgin Mary to three schoolchildren in the remote Rhineland village of Marpingen in 1876, and the response thereto. With sure control of his material and an archaeologist's reconstructive gift, Blackbourn deftly reveals the Marpingen events as a tangled but telling intersection of multiple cultural currents: religious strife, both interdenominational and between competing tendencies in the Catholic hierarchy itself; local communal rivalry; class tensions; grassroots populist activism; Bismarck's ongoing Kulturkampf (``cultural war'') against the Catholic Church; and the upheavals in work and family life provoked by the confrontation of a traditional rural culture with the very different rhythms of a 19th-century industrial state. Blackbourn brushes against the grain of readers' expectations: He encourages us to regard the widespread popular support of the visionaries not as superstitious medieval credulity but as a sophisticated mobilization of deep-rooted cultural resources by a community beset by social dislocation. Conversely, the ``progressive'' modernizing forces of state authority, whose response to the apparitions varied from patrician condescension to outright contempt or suspicion, stand revealed as at least as self- righteous and blinkered (by a faith in secular rationality often as unyielding as religious dogma) as the peasants they undertook to control. The Church itself is riven and ambivalent, its sponsorship of the cult of the Madonna at odds with the increasingly authoritarian bent of the 19th-century Vatican. This dense, authoritative book demands and deserves an attentive reading and offers rewards few recent historical narratives can match.
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-41843-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
A markedly contemporary study that navigates the New Testament scholar past the perils of Pauline theology. Boyarin (Talmudic Culture/Univ. of Calif., Berkeley; Carnal Israel, not reviewed) attempts to ``reclaim Paul as an important Jewish thinker.'' He goes on to establish this primary apostle as a Hellenized Jew whose Platonic sensibility calls for a universal sameness that negates the divisions separating Jew from Gentile and man from woman. The disembodied spirituality of Platonic dualism allows females (especially virgins) to be equal to men under Christ, and allows an uncircumcised Christian of any gender to ``circumcise the foreskin of her [sic] heart'' with Hebrew Bible commandments universalized and allegorized. Boyarin does not glibly valorize Paul as a champion of feminism and an opponent of Jewish exclusivist chauvinism. After crediting Paul for being a radical social critic, the author makes clear how the apostle's pre-Marxist universalism too easily slid into violent coercion in the later, blood-soaked chapters of Christian history. Boyarin analyzes the work of many Christian scholars in concluding that Lutheran misinterpretations of Paul allow us to consider the apostle to be far more antagonistic to Jews and Judaism than he really was. The benefit of Boyarin's Jewish defense against hermeneutical Christian anti-Semitism is tempered by his disdain for a Judaic ``tendency towards contemptuous neglect for human solidarity'' and his anti- Zionism (``modern Jewish statist nationalism has been...very violent and exclusionary''). Sometimes he confuses Christian ``salvation'' theology with Jewish belief, and he fails to find any similarity between Pauline Platonism and the allegorical and universal levels of Torah laws. The final chapter digresses to a personal view of the ``essentialist/social constructionist dichotomy,'' but the book does end with ample notes and bibliography. A rewarding read for students of Christian theology willing to be challenged by today's multicultural, poststructuralist, postfeminist scholarship.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-520-08592-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
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