by Michael Phayer ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000
A fair and even-tempered account of a volatile subject. (20 b&w photos, not seen)
A well-reasoned but damning overview of the Vatican’s response to Nazi atrocities during and after WWII.
Following hard upon John Cornwell’s controversial Hitler’s Pope (not reviewed), and John Paul II’s unprecedented apology to Jews in Israel, Phayer (History/Marquette Univ.) offers exactly what was needed all along: a more incisive, if somewhat dry, view of Pius XII that portrays him not as a power-mad anti-Semite, but as an indecisive ruler with definite German sympathies whose fear of Communism and Fascist reprisals (as well as his astonishingly naïve efforts to seek diplomatic protections) provided few obstacles to the Nazi extermination of millions of Jews, Gypsies, and Polish Catholics. Elected to the papacy in 1939, Eugenio Pacelli took over a divided church whose more liberal members (led by his predecessor, Pius XI) were highly alarmed by their fellow Catholics’ hatred of Jews (including Jewish converts to Catholicism). The author believes that Pius XII halted an encyclical that would have condemned anti-Semitism because he knew that Hitler, a Catholic apostate, had threatened similar attacks against German Catholics. Part of the problem may also have been that Pius XII (who had lived for years in Germany as a Vatican diplomat) looked upon German National Socialism as the devil that he knew—compared to the anti-religious mania of Stalin’s Communism. Once WWII began, in the author’s view, Pius’s refusal to aid Catholics helping Jews escape persecution and his silence about Nazi depravities were, in fact, attempts to maintain Vatican neutrality and to control a church rife with virulent anti-Semites—many of whom would not have hesitated, with Fascist backing, to overthrow the papacy and possibly even destroy the Vatican itself. Although no apologist for the Vatican, Phayer concludes that, given the church’s perversely divided loyalties and its pathetically powerless condition before and during WWII, Pius should be judged not as a collaborator so much as a sad example of a weak man in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A fair and even-tempered account of a volatile subject. (20 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-253-33725-9
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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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