by Michael L. Satlow ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2014
Regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the material, the author’s expertise cannot be doubted.
Satlow (Religious and Judaic Studies/Brown Univ.; The Gift in Antiquity, 2013) explores the holy writings of the Bible back more than 10,000 years.
The author’s knowledge and his resources, both literary and archaeological, are vast. He is searching for the evolution of the Scriptures we read now, whether referred to as the Torah, the Bible or the Pentateuch or Septuagint. The question is not so much who wrote them as how they evolved into universal works of authority. Satlow specifically differentiates among normative, oracular and literary authority. These writings developed in Judah, through the Babylonian captivity, the Hellenistic period and into the time of Jesus. What we call the Bible didn’t really exist until St. Athanasius of Alexandria contributed his list of the holy books in the A.D. fourth century, and it was the A.D. 11th century before there was a standard Hebrew text. These books are not historical in the truest sense; the legacy of the texts and their interpreters is their power to bring order to our world. The author traces the story of the Middle Eastern people as they jockeyed for power for centuries, always carrying their texts to new locales. The story lives thanks to the scribes, who played the largest part in maintaining, copying and, most importantly, reading the texts to their illiterate populations. Satlow’s book is so packed with information that it will appeal most to scholars and those who have spent years studying religious writings. For those who rarely read the Bible and have little knowledge of ancient history, it will be confusing but edifying. In conclusion, the author writes, “[t]his is perhaps the Bible’s greatest legacy: the radically implausible notion that one can build a community, a religion, a culture, and even a country around a text.”
Regardless of the reader’s familiarity with the material, the author’s expertise cannot be doubted.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-300-17191-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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 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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