The sympathetic portraits Wilcox (Waiting for an Army to Die, 1983) paints of the Plowshares members are as flowery as the Volkswagens they drove in the 1960's, but do offer a glimpse into the hears of those on the cutting edge of the religious antinuclear movement. Wilcox profiles brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan and lesser-known members of the Plowshares movement, named after the biblical command to ``beat swords into plowshares.'' He lays out their religious beliefs, their family histories, and their prior work in social-justice issues to explain how they came to risk long prison terms to ``symbolically disarm'' nuclear hardware. For Lin Romano—a housing advocate who once seized a priest's microphone and pleaded (unsuccessfully) with parishioners to allow the homeless to sleep inside the church during a cold snap, the decision to break into the Willow Grove Navel Air Station and pour her own blood over the controls of a P-3 Orion aircraft— came from a growing desire to ``resist the very root of the evil.'' Wilcox often extrapolates from historical record to include statements that academics might have made if they had been allowed to testify for the Plowshare defendants; hypothetical trivial-pursuit cards about the movement; and an eerie description of what would have happened if one of the protesters had been shot while climbing the fence into Willow Grove. Wilcox's tribute would have been more successful had he stuck to the activists' own cogent explanations of why they resist the ``false worship of nuclear weapons,'' and omitted his own rather odd interpretations.
Pub Date: May 16, 1991
ISBN: 0-201-52231-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
A useful text for readers curious about New Age spirituality.
An intense exploration of the mystical concept of “ageless wisdom,” which Seifer and Vieweg describe as a body of ideas, laws and truths that have guided seekers throughout time in finding and reveling in the world’s spirituality.
This second edition of the text, following closely on the heels of the first, opens with a well-written and thought-provoking introduction that quickly lays out the authors’ hypothesis–mankind is now, more than ever, ready and willing to embark upon a spiritual quest. The authors point to tragedies such as 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina as catalysts for this movement. Seifer and Vieweg support this theory with a series of 10 dense chapters, each of which opens with a thought-provoking quotation from a saint, poet, writer or prophet that logically guides the chapter. Although the book provides ample coverage of the history of ageless wisdom, the authors also focus on illuminating its role in the world’s current state, and make predictions about its future. Seifer and Vieweg thoroughly cover reincarnation, the qualities and existence of the human soul, the experience of spiritual awakening and the history of ageless wisdom. Woven throughout the text is a fine balance of description of and quotations from spiritual leaders from around the world and across time–this provides this text with a global and timeless perspective. Each chapter concludes with end-notes which provide additional information, much of which is historical in nature and provides opportunity for future exploration. The book also includes a short glossary of terms, enabling readers to better understand some of the more complicated spiritual concepts, such as Etheric Vision (“the power to see the subtler grades of matter with the strictly physical eye”). Though abstract and wordy, the book is appropriate for seekers wanting to understand the roots of ageless wisdom.
A useful text for readers curious about New Age spirituality.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-9820047-0-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Rigorous yet readable notes, sketches, and articles that round out a four-volume panorama of the philosophical pantheon. The eminent existential philosopher Jaspers (18831969) died before he could complete this work. Editors Ermarth and Ehrlich have, however, been able to stitch together a coherent book that, in accordance with Jaspers's plan, primarily covers the philosophers whom he termed ``the disturbers'': thinkers for whom doubt and despair loomed large. Jaspers opens with a discussion of Descartes. A disturber in the probing style of his thought, he stands apart, however, insofar as he compartmentalized issues of faith and philosophy. The other disturbers Jaspers characterizes as ``great awakeners.'' Working the boundaries between philosophy and theology, they sought to think man back to some sense of completeness. These include Pascal, whose famous wager for the existence of God Jaspers critiques at some length; Kierkegaard, the great philosopher of faith, over whom Jaspers lingers longest; and Nietzsche, discussed briefly in part as a counterpoint to Kierkegaard. Interestingly, Jaspers includes a chapter on the 18th- century theoretician and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, declaring his work to be exemplary for its critical discernment. In a short section on ``philosophers in other realms,'' such as the sciences, Jaspers discusses the philosophical import and the (in his view) severe limits of Einstein's thought. Max Weber, in contrast, elicits unstinting praise. The book closes with an appreciation of Marx that subsumes a harsh critique of the Marxist style of disputation. Jaspers makes information about philosophers' lives and the dissemination of their works integral to his accounts of their ideas. Thus a sense of history and of human contingency pervade these pieces. Twenty-five years after its author's death, this is by no means a cutting-edge work—but this great thinker's ruminations on his predecessors have a timeless quality to them.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-136943-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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