A Franciscan missionary battles drug-runners and Shining Path terrorists on behalf of Peruvian Indians: a story competently told with the help of the Hoffers, specialists in coauthoring tales of Third World trauma (Midnight Express, Not Without My Daughter). When Gagnon, a New Hampshire native, sets up his mission in 1969 among the Ashaninka Indians of central Peru, his task is formidable but predictable: to educate an indigenous people—who paint their faces, hunt with bow and arrow, and stride around half-naked—to enter the modern world without decimating their traditional ways. Gagnon's success is marked: Under his supervision, the Ashaninka build an airstrip, become literate, learn to function in a cash economy. But then anonymous ``narcos'' appear, appropriating the airstrip to ferry shipments of cocaine to points north and offering Gagnon large sums—which he spurns with disdain—for his cooperation. The real horror, however, arrives with the Maoist Shining Path guerrillas, who terrorize Gagnon, torch the mission, demand young men as conscripts for their slave armies, and castrate or crucify Ashaninka who refuse to cooperate. When Gagnon goes to Lima for help, both the American embassy and the Church hierarchy resist his pleas, although a contingent of Green Berets finally escorts him back into the rain forest. Further battles with the Shining Path lead to two evacuations and newspaper sketches of Gagnon as a rifle-packing padre. While he rejects this cartoonish image, Gagnon comes off here as sharp-tongued, hotheaded, and utterly committed to the cause of the Indians. He provides a token defense of liberation theology, but this is basically a visceral story of good against evil, told by a man with little tolerance for subtleties. A moderately gripping story of a modern-day hero, despite the warts. (Photos)
Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1993
ISBN: 0-688-11796-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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