A worthy book for those seeking company, not guidance, on their spiritual paths.
In this debut memoir based on a series of personal blog posts, Mueller questions God in order to discover her purpose in life.
Mueller had been a regular churchgoer for several years, but regularly experienced anger and frustration toward her loved ones. One day, after running errands with her mother, who had lately depended on her for care, Mueller had an emotional outburst. She told her mother several troubling truths in a restaurant parking lot, and then left the vehicle and started walking. While walking, she realized how easy it could be to leave her life behind. She began contemplating suicide. Shortly after, she entered a new understanding of God’s power and love. Her suicide plans evolved into a request for God to take her. This plea became a daily prayer for God to reveal her purpose. Mueller began to devote time to reading self-help and biblical stories (“I was starting to think the Bible was more like an instruction manual of how everything was created and how it all worked so we could know how to use them to live and be happy as God originally intended”). Though she felt unsuccessful in business, she was glad for the time to contemplate her relationship with God, and created a new product, called Message Balls—golf balls with text that encourages people to talk with God. Mueller is detailed in her analysis of life, capturing the day-to-day progression of thoughts, the mundane events, and the small miracles, which is natural for a writer working from blog posts. Her chapters are short, and often titled after an emotion or a state of mind with the ending of “ville” (“Complaintville” and “Cactusville,” for example). This strategy seems to indicate that the author has spent enough time pondering a certain element, embodying it, so that it feels like its own place. The book takes a somewhat mystical approach to discovering God’s will. The author pulls heavily from Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret and guests on The Oprah Winfrey Show to complement her reading of the Bible. Mueller often compares the Bible to other self-help books to demonstrate its efficacy in turning a life around. And the author recounts disputes with other Christians to flag theological hotspots.
A worthy book for those seeking company, not guidance, on their spiritual paths.Pub Date: March 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5028-8636-1
Page Count: 192
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.
The Book of Genesis as imagined by a veteran voice of underground comics.
R. Crumb’s pass at the opening chapters of the Bible isn’t nearly the act of heresy the comic artist’s reputation might suggest. In fact, the creator of Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural is fastidiously respectful. Crumb took pains to preserve every word of Genesis—drawing from numerous source texts, but mainly Robert Alter’s translation, The Five Books of Moses (2004)—and he clearly did his homework on the clothing, shelter and landscapes that surrounded Noah, Abraham and Isaac. This dedication to faithful representation makes the book, as Crumb writes in his introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.” But his efforts are in their own way irreverent, and Crumb feels no particular need to deify even the most divine characters. God Himself is not much taller than Adam and Eve, and instead of omnisciently imparting orders and judgment He stands beside them in Eden, speaking to them directly. Jacob wrestles not with an angel, as is so often depicted in paintings, but with a man who looks not much different from himself. The women are uniformly Crumbian, voluptuous Earth goddesses who are both sexualized and strong-willed. (The endnotes offer a close study of the kinds of power women wielded in Genesis.) The downside of fitting all the text in is that many pages are packed tight with small panels, and too rarely—as with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah—does Crumb expand his lens and treat signature events dramatically. Even the Flood is fairly restrained, though the exodus of the animals from the Ark is beautifully detailed. The author’s respect for Genesis is admirable, but it may leave readers wishing he had taken a few more chances with his interpretation, as when he draws the serpent in the Garden of Eden as a provocative half-man/half-lizard. On the whole, though, the book is largely a tribute to Crumb’s immense talents as a draftsman and stubborn adherence to the script.
An erudite and artful, though frustratingly restrained, look at Old Testament stories.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-06102-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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