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THE ROAD LESS TRAVELED AND BEYOND

SPIRITUAL GROWTH IN AN AGE OF ANXIETY

Peck's latest offering is the final installment of his ``Road Less Traveled'' trilogy (The Road Less Traveled, 1978, Further Along the Road Less Traveled, 1993) and a synthesis of his thinking to date. Is there a link between personal growth, spirituality, and basic mental health? Peck has spent much of his adult life arguing that such a link exists and struggling with the more difficult task of describing it. In this new work he focuses not on health but on its absence, asserting that many forms of human evil can be traced to a failure to face up to the challenge of thinking for ourselves. Confronted by life's complexities, we fall back on stereotypes in the way that we see things and treat each other. Peck goes on to argue that we must cultivate the ability to think clearly, as well as a healthy love of self (and an awareness of our own mortality), if we are not to be swept up in damaging group-driven behavior. He criticizes the denial of God and the human soul in many circles, not least by psychiatrists and the helping professions generally, as instances of simplistic thinking. As in The Road Less Traveled, Peck warns that, contrary to what our culture tells us, difficulty and pain are unavoidable ingredients of the process of personal growth. However, he now believes that his earlier stance in favor of traditional American individualism needs to be amplified by an awareness of our common interdependence and the notion of community. Peck speaks from his own personal and professional experience as a psychiatrist. This gives his writing a powerful existential quality; yet together with his habit of frequently quoting from his own books, it sometimes makes him sound pompous, as if he alone has honestly wrestled with the perennial philosophical and theological issues he raises. Generally balanced, though, and challenging; sure to appeal to Peck's large following. (Literary Guild alternate selection)

Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-684-81314-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1996

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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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