Self-empowerment fantasy by a counselor for those devastated by business losses or losing a job. Tye has several books and videos on career recovery, self-transformation, and ultimate success. Paul Peterson, a counselor for kids on the skids, runs a recovery school that has 200 enrollees. But through poor business management, Paul is about to lose the school and his mortgaged home. It's Foreclosure Day. Paul goes to the bank for a meeting, blows his stack on account of his fears, stomps outdoors to find a $75 parking ticket on his Chevy (he's in a wheelchair zone), races off to a nearby canyon cliff and jumps off. It's a wonderful life, though, because his guardian angel, Rafe, saves him and begins running time backward so that Paul sees himself backing away from the canyon, going backwards into the bank and going through the whole morning all over again, in reverse motion, while Rafe points out a few flaws in Paul's way of handling his anxieties. Then he's allowed to go through the morning once more. Many of his obstacles turn out to be self-created by fear and misunderstanding of others. This time, people who might have helped him but were dismissed out of hand by Paul come through for him and the school is saved. By facing brutal facts, Paul discovers how he has undersold both himself and life. Along the way, Rafe proffers a number of aphorisms meant to inspire folks who may be in the money dumps: ``Caring is the root of courage''; ``Fear is a prison from which action wins freedom''; ``With faith fear becomes an ally.'' And so on. Sinking people will grasp any straw, and this small, lightly fictionalized handbook of survival may well lend courage to faint hearts.
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-31836-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1997
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
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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