by Naomi H. Rosenblatt & Joshua Horwitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 1995
Psychotherapist and Bible teacher Rosenblatt's first book is a well-meshed combination of her chosen fields: It's a self-help reading of the book of Genesis. With her longtime student Horwitz, a writer, Rosenblatt presents what is in many ways the most traditional form of biblical exegesisa line-by-line, literal-minded interpretation of the Scriptures. But Rosenblatt's explanations are colored by her experiences as therapist and by her obvious self-empowerment agenda. For her, Genesis is not so much a religious tract as a document of human relationships, sexuality, and spirituality. As such, it is a also a guide to life today, or ``a three-step approach to endowing our lives with meaning and direction.'' These steps are: identity, which is spiritual and flows from God; accountability, meaning that we are responsible for our actions; and purpose, which is to ``preserve creation by making our lives an expression of the innately divine qualities that make us human.'' In Rosenblatt's weltanschauungsome would argue a reactionary onehumanity should exert its dominion over the world and over its own nature. But Rosenblatt is at times less traditional, reading into the text whatever seems appropriate to her 20th-century career-woman sensibilities. However understandable this attitude, it makes for some exegetical acrobatics, as when she explains that God's telling Eve, ``And [your husband] shall rule over you,'' in fact means that man will protect woman when she is homebound caring for her childrenas women were forced to be throughout their childbearing years in biblical times, when, Rosenblatt apologizes, ``birth control was nonexistent.'' Still, an often insightful look at the eternal nature of human experience. (Book-of-the-Month Club/Quality Paperback Book Club/Jewish Book Club selections; author tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-31330-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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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