A budding Marco Polo of religiosity, D'Antonio—who mapped Christian fundamentalism in Fall from Grace (1989)—now offers a cautiously enthusiastic survey of even further reaches of faith: America's outposts of New Age belief. In the best tradition of exploring, D'Antonio goes native as he travels—for instance (as told in a prologue that also includes a capsule history of the New Age), plunging his hand into fire to test his spiritual mettle during a visit to Long Island shaman Irene Siegel. From Long Island, it's off to the ``New Age bazaar'' of Sedona, Arizona, where he suffers through a sweat-lodge ceremony (``worried that I was literally being cooked alive, I sank to the dirt floor''), and then on to L.A., where he attends ``healing'' services for AIDS sufferers—and reveals a moral righteousness that balances his Scout-like eagerness. Listening to famed healer Louise Hay claim that, as D'Antonio paraphrases it, ``the poor of the world are [karmically] responsible for their plight, as are those afflicted with AIDS,'' the author bristles: ``Anyone who has seen real suffering would find this thinking repellent. I did.'' In Philadelphia, observing the channel ``Lazaris''; in California's yoga-fueled Ananda Village; and especially in Iowa, at Maharishi International University, D'Antonio finds plenty more that disturbs him (``TM, as practiced at MIU...is like the worst of religion: unreasonable, repressive, authoritarian''). But he also finds much to admire—in Vermont, where he marvels at the happy employees of Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream; in Detroit, where he basks in the ``psychospirituality'' of M. Scott Peck; and, most of all, in Upstate New York, where he plays ``mystic baseball'' at the Omega Institute and is ``transported back in time, to a moment when I believed.'' Congenial, colorful, without profound insight—much like, judging from this tour, most of the New Age movement itself.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-517-57802-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1991
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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