Sure to kick up some biblical dust: a graphic, instructional story unlikely to receive the Church’s imprimatur.
A knowledgeable journalist profiles history’s most renowned Jewish mother, tracing a life barely touched upon in the gospels.
From the beginning, Hazelton (Driving to Detroit, 1998, etc.) asks for trouble. Her first words describe a pregnant, 13-year-old peasant girl clad in a torn linen shift, “short and wiry, with dark olive skin.” Maryam—her true name, the author asserts—probably never resided in the Temple, but she was instructed in the healing arts by her grandmother, a Wise Woman called Salome. (Hazleton takes it as a fair supposition that Maryam passed those arts to her son.) Gingerly approaching the central matter of the Virgin Birth, the author reviews the state of gynecology, the practice of contraception, and the mechanics of parturition 2,000 years ago. Was the doctrine of virginity simply a mistranslation of Matthew’s Septuagint? She thinks not, explaining the conception as a paradoxical mystery of religion, not physical fact. Hazleton skips the annunciation, skirts Matthew’s hint that Jesus may have had siblings, and suggests that Joseph probably acquired his role as Maryam’s consort and the physical dad in order to provide a Davidian lineage for Jesus. From his birth, the text quickly shifts to Maryam at his crucifixion, complete with all the grisly details about that form of execution. Thence to the burial and the resurrection, which “only makes sense on another level of knowledge, one that supersedes the factual.” The facts, however, remain fascinating, while the novelistic suppositions are pure dramaturgy, as uncanonical as the Sibylline Oracles. The biography takes a decided feminist turn as Hazleton ascribes the new religion’s establishment to the women who followed the son of Maryam. This Mary isn’t the blue-robed icon painted by Fra Angelico or the young mother carved by Michelangelo, but throughout it all, Maryam remains full of grace.
Sure to kick up some biblical dust: a graphic, instructional story unlikely to receive the Church’s imprimatur.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-236-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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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