by Michel de Certeau & translated by Michael B. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2000
The best rendering of Satan’s forays into old Catholic France remains Aldous Huxley’s still vital Devils of Loudun. Go there...
A scholarly work for hardy souls who enjoy reading about tortured ones.
In France, ever since Sartre, heavyweight intellectuals have gained fame by writing inscrutable prose. De Certeau’s study, originally published in France in 1970, is exemplary in that regard, and Americans (the heirs of Twain and Hemingway) will find it hard going. De Certeau, the late, distinguished Jesuit scholar, was the right historian to try to bring fresh perspectives to the events of demonic possession, exorcism, and religious belief that convulsed a community in western France in the 1630s. It is a story that might appeal to fans of Stephen King if only they had the patience to wade through this version of it. For it is a fantastic tale of religion gone mad, cruel torment, grand hypocrisy, clever play-acting, and great courage in a time gone by. The genuine strangeness of the devil’s supposed possession of some nuns (through the vehicle of a parish priest) remains gripping and can’t fail to move even the most agnostic modern audience—except in this tortured text, an artifact of literary “new historicism.” De Certeau provides ample selections from contemporary documents, each foreign and curious to modern eyes. He also emphasizes the dramaturgic qualities of the cruel medical and psychological examinations of the possessed, the stout faith of the condemned priest, and the lively public debates that surrounded his trial. But do readers have to be tried, too? Translator Smith must have been sorely taxed to render the original into some semblance of clear English. As if acknowledging his difficulty, he leaves some passages in the original Latin and French—fine for specialist scholars and graduate students but not so for normal souls looking for greater insight into an infamous series of events.
The best rendering of Satan’s forays into old Catholic France remains Aldous Huxley’s still vital Devils of Loudun. Go there first. (32 illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-226-10035-9
Page Count: 258
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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