A saccharine, thoroughly lackluster paean to the power of eternal love.
A husband's vapid memoir about a car crash that left his wife unable to recognize him.
Never underestimate what a star-studded Hollywood movie can do for a poorly written book. Carpenter's account of the 1993 car crash that changed his family’s life was first published in 2000. The recent film retold the story with leads Channing Tatum and Rachel McAdams. Unfortunately, the actual narrative leaves much to be desired. Carpenter's book opens with the author reminiscing about how he met his wife Krickitt over the telephone. One conversation with her was enough to make him feel like a “nervous, lovesick teenager.” Soon, Carpenter, who lived in New Mexico, was calling Krickitt, who lived in California, almost every day. After a brief Christian courtship, the two decided to marry. But their conjugal bliss was shattered when the newlyweds were involved in a collision that changed everything “in the blink of an eye.” Carpenter escaped with physical injuries that eventually healed, but Krickitt experienced brain trauma that changed her personality and took away all recollection of her husband and their shared past. Carpenter eventually won back his wife by helping her through a long rehabilitation process, but Krickitt never recovered any of her memories of their courtship and marriage. Despite the story’s inherent drama, Carpenter only skims the surface of the underlying emotional tension, and the amateurish writing (“It was as if she decided to be the friendliest, most helpful person her customers talked to every day. If that was the case then she was a roaring success in my mind”) and flat character portraits further hamstring the narrative.
A saccharine, thoroughly lackluster paean to the power of eternal love.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4336-7579-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Broadman & Holman
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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