Though a bit overly detailed and repetitive, the book runs all the bases with aplomb.
The acclaimed Buddhist scholar discusses how Buddha invented baseball to show us the “path,” which may travel through as much misery as exultation.
In baseball, there is an extremely fine line between delight and suffering (one of the Buddha's four noble truths). Consider: A team that loses 4 of every 10 games during the Major League Baseball season goes to the playoffs, while a team that loses 5 of every 10 never does. Lopez—a professor of Buddhist and Tibetan studies at the University of Michigan who has written extensively on the subject and translated several works by the Dalai Lama—first establishes his bona fides as a lifelong student of baseball and fan of the New York Yankees. Baseball is a Buddhist game, and only those seeking enlightenment ever reach nirvana (the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York). Lopez digs into the eternal truth of suffering by telling us there will be baseball happiness in ample supply and that one of the first avenues to joy is the recognition of impermanence and lack of self (the ego strikes out). Out of the book's dugout and bullpen stream a pantheon of baseball greats, not least Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, each shouldering a critical lesson from the Buddha. In the process, the author throws a few curveballs in elucidating such things as karma, tantra, sutra, Vajrapani, and other terms almost as arcane as baseball's sabermetrics. Pitching Buddhist and baseball history, Lopez’s amusing contrivance of a book is more than a little tongue-in-cheek, but the author’s aim is to enhance our love of the game by a more profound understanding of its fundamentally Buddhist nature. He also seeks to counsel that impermanence itself is impermanent, that the cycle of birth and death is endless, and that even the gods can't hit .400 anymore.
Though a bit overly detailed and repetitive, the book runs all the bases with aplomb.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-23791-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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