Pragmatic, compassionate advice.
A lighted path for dark times.
In his previous book, Midlife, Setiya, a professor of philosophy at MIT, called upon myriad thinkers for guidance in overcoming his anguish when his life seemed “like a mere accumulation of deeds” as he strived for professional success. Now, amid an ongoing pandemic, mass unemployment, the ravages of climate change, and the revival of fascism, he again looks to philosophy, history, film, and literature for solace and illumination. Life is hard, to be sure, but thinkers and artists from Aquinas to Virginia Woolf, Emily Dickinson to P.D. James, Descartes to Sartre, help him to craft a “map with which to navigate rough terrain.” Along with devastating global issues, one’s sense of tumult and struggle can be fomented by physical disability and pain, psychic pain, loss, grief, a sense of personal failure, and injustice. Setiya was 27 when his own experience with chronic pain began suddenly with “a band of tension running through my groin.” For more than a decade, the pain defied diagnosis, and it still besets him. Pain and disability, he reflects, shape our relationship to our bodies as well as “our relation to others and their relation to us.” For Setiya, the pain’s positive result was in generating his “presumptive compassion” for other people’s experiences. Although he considers himself an “inveterate loner,” the author underscores the importance of fostering connections. From Aristotle, the “great theorist of friendship,” and others, Setiya sees that the way out of loneliness is “through the needs of other people.” Confronting a feeling of powerlessness in the face of structural injustice or systemic problems, he counsels engagement with collective action in the service of a cause. For him, the cause is climate change; at MIT, he has become involved in the Fossil Free movement. Even in hard times, writes the author, we cannot lose hope: “standing with or searching for the truth, attending to what’s possible.”
Pragmatic, compassionate advice.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-53821-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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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