For Vatican watchers, a good reference to have on hand when the smoke next rises over St. Peter’s Square.
An oddity: an instant book dedicated to an event that has yet to happen.
If you’re a betting person, writes National Catholic Reporter Vatican correspondent Allen, don’t put your money on an American succeeding John Paul II as pontiff. In the spectrum of odds, “the only probability determined by geography is that the next pope will not be from the US. The Vatican prizes its diplomatic independence too keenly to risk it by electing a superpower pope.” The chances are good, he adds, that the next leader of the Catholic church will be a non-Italian: the 456-year-old Italian monopoly on the papacy was broken by the current pontiff, and of 133 voting members of the College of Cardinals that elects the pope, only 23 are Italian. With all those handicaps and cautions in mind, Allen goes on to survey the field, writing of strong and weak candidates, picking his 20-odd favorites, and long-listing the rest of the eligible cardinals. Every cardinal who enters the conclave, he cautions, is eligible and cannot be written off; those who would lay odds on what he calls “the upcoming papal sweepstakes,” he warns, “shouldn’t allow themselves to trip on their assumptions” and try to outguess the powerbrokers within the Vatican walls. Allen’s roster of candidates and their qualifications will be the strong selling point of Conclave. Breathless though the prose is, it conveys much that is of use, including, for instance, a thorough discussion of just what the job of pope entails (settling squabbles and traveling a lot) and how popes get elected in the first place.
For Vatican watchers, a good reference to have on hand when the smoke next rises over St. Peter’s Square.Pub Date: June 18, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50453-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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