An enjoyable sojourn into feminine spirituality.
A lovely memoir of the quest for inner peace.
As English professor and secular Jew Weimer (Back Talk: Teaching Lost Selves to Speak, 1994) sits paralyzed by fear during a bumpy plane ride, she begins to feel a mysterious calming presence. Though she’s not sure how to interpret the experience, she’s certain that she shouldn’t tell her husband, David, a devout atheist. Instead, she confides in a friend, who matter-of-factly states, “ ‘Sounds like you met the Black Madonna.’ ” Intrigued by her friend’s comment, the author seeks to learn more about this embodiment of sacred maternal power. As she and David travel to Europe for a sabbatical, Weimer realizes that she desires to understand not only the Black Madonna, but also her late mother, with whom she shared a complex relationship. While David remains hostile to her sudden interest in prayer, she manages to transform the sabbatical into a spiritual quest, navigating a labyrinth in Ravenna, meandering alone through picturesque villages, sitting in chapels devoted to the Madonna and studying complicated texts about sacred sites. When the trip ends, Weimer continues her spiritual journey. Back at home, she attends a one-day “Walking Meditation” retreat, held at a local Episcopal church and led by a female rabbi, who teaches about female representations of the divine in Judaism and Islam. A final, shorter trip to Paris culminates in a general sense of ease and contentment. Throughout, the author demonstrates solid observation skills and a sharp eye for detail, as well as a skillful hand at metaphorical language. When she and her husband depart for foreign countries, they find that they discover each other anew, “with the same attention and wonder that we bring to a Gothic cathedral–craning our necks to admire the vaulted ceiling, descending into the crypt to stand on its ancient stones.”
An enjoyable sojourn into feminine spirituality.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2005
ISBN: 1-59858-114-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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