by Mark Kurlansky ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2011
Two of the chapter titles anticipate two of the likely responses: “So?” and “Huh?”
A conceptual essay collection as parlor game.
Even shorter than this very short book initially appears (with lots of white space and full-page illustrations), the latest from Kurlansky (The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris, 2010, etc.) is a radical departure from his usual work, which features exhaustive research into topics of comparatively limited scope (Salt, Cod, etc.). Here the author uses an interrogative shorthand to sketch inexhaustible concepts such as the purpose and meaning of life (and death), the essence of literature and the ontology of asking questions. Nearly every sentence (as well as chapter titles) ends with a question mark. Some are questions; others are declarative sentences reworked into questions. Some blur the line between serious and seriously goofy: “If whoers are gossips, wheners impatient, whyers dreamers, where-ers lost, and howers pragmatists, is it the whaters who cut to the heart of things,” he asks in the title chapter. “What am I talking about? What is this book? What is a book?” And so on. Kurlansky also cuts to the heart of metaphysical inquiry: “Why are we here? Why is all of this here? What is death? What does it mean that outer space is infinite and what is after infinity?” Is the book’s concept a good one? Does it compromise the author’s originality that the recent novel by Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? (2009), adopted a similar stylistic strategy? Though the book can easily be read in one short sitting, it might try the patience of some readers.
Two of the chapter titles anticipate two of the likely responses: “So?” and “Huh?”Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-7906-9
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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by Mark Kurlansky ; illustrated by Eric Zelz
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by Albert Camus ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 26, 1955
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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by Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
by Stephen Batchelor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 18, 2020
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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