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REVELATIONS

ALIEN CONTACT AND HUMAN DECEPTION

Bracing finale to Vallee's ``Alien Contact trilogy'' (Dimensions, 1988; Confrontations, 1990), as the ufologist brings some famous UFO cases down to earth—and into the mud. In Dimensions, Vallee presented his theory that UFOs are probably not spacecraft but manifestations of a consciousness- controlling ``technology'' from ``dimensions beyond spacetime''; in Confrontations, he bolstered that theory with examples from his own casebook. Here, deftly blending theory and memoir, he attempts to clear ufololgy of ``the weeds and the vines of human fantasy and...the poisonous flowers of unbalanced minds.'' That is, to Vallee, cases from the infamous Roswell incident (spacecraft and aliens purportedly captured by the US Army in 1947) to the popular legend of Area 51 (aliens working tentacle-in-hand with US officials beneath the Nevada desert) to the alleged abduction of Franck Fontaine in 1979 (exhaustively researched firsthand by Vallee) to the purported top-secret federal UFO-investigating committee of Howard Blum's Out There (1990) are not only mostly nonsense, but—here's the rub—``complex hoaxes that have been carefully engineered for our benefit.'' But by whom, and why? By federal disinformation agents, and possibly as ``psychological warfare experiments'' or ``as a cover for something else''—i.e., experimental spy/warcraft or real ``flying discs.'' Vallee offers little hard evidence to back those conjectures, but he does unglove the heavy hand of military intelligence in many cases, while at the same time exposing the absurdity of others, including Budd Hopkins's best-selling alien-rape reports. So what's left? A host of genuinely mysterious cases, e.g., the 1989 Soviet Union sightings, and the spirit of rigorous scientific inquiry that Vallee urges they be subjected to. Except for Vallee's wobbly conclusions, a forceful and refreshingly iconoclastic study that, for all its good sense, will likely add up to only a cry in the alien-infested ufowilderness.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991

ISBN: 0-345-37172-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1991

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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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