Inspirational advice on forging one’s own path, in bite-size verses and columns, with a few rough patches, but nonetheless...
Borrowing from Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (2006) for its epigraph, Jack’s collection of free-verse poems and newspaper columns channels an optimistic perspective on life.
“Signposts along the path of my life,” Jack says of the stories and poems comprising his first book. In it, he tells the story of his homecoming back to southern Colorado and self-discovery after his career took him away for more than 20 years. But when he came home to the San Luis Valley, vivified by his newfound love of horses, he was able to ponder the course of his life. His newspaper writings reflect lessons learned: He thanks those who gave him moral support, notably his mother and father and his friend Diane; reflects on how time flies; considers ties to ancestors, parents, children and grandchildren; unpacks the definition of professional success; and reveals the secret to a happy marriage. “You find the person you love and just keep working on it,” says his mother, who’s been married to his father for more than 60 years. His everyman’s voice—cultivated in his years as a columnist—fosters a familiarity with readers that helps his hard-earned advice go down easily This method is particularly effective when Jack takes on controversial topics, as when he criticizes the tenure process for professors, or when he suggests that we should be choosier in deciding whom to trust. His poems explore similar themes in simple language with inspirational overtones, in a style evocative of Mary Oliver’s praise poems, though without her religious concerns. Jack’s meditations are more rooted in human-to-human contact: our relationships with one another and our surroundings. He tends to lean heavily on cliché—“Lost in loneliness, / Searching for a flicker / Of hope”—but he’s also capable of capturing memorable images, especially in describing the singular geography of the American West. In “Storm on the Horizon,” for instance, he describes city lights that make “Albuquerque seem so alive we could watch it grow.”
Inspirational advice on forging one’s own path, in bite-size verses and columns, with a few rough patches, but nonetheless rewarding for optimistic readers open to the journey.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-1458208194
Page Count: 84
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.
A writer’s journey to find himself.
In January 2015, French novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and memoirist Carrère began a 10-day meditation retreat in the Morvan forest of central France. For 10 hours per day, he practiced Vipassana, “the commando training of meditation,” hoping for both self-awareness and material for a book. “I’m under cover,” he confesses, planning to rely on memory rather than break the center’s rule forbidding note taking. Long a practitioner of tai chi, the author saw yoga, too, as a means of “curtailing your ego, your greed, your thirst for competition and conquest, about educating your conscience to allow it unfiltered access to reality, to things as they are.” Harsh reality, however, ended his stay after four days: A friend had been killed in a brutal attack at the magazine Charlie Hebdo, and he was asked to speak at his funeral. Carrère’s vivid memoir, translated by Lambert—and, Carrère admits, partly fictionalized—covers four tumultuous years, weaving “seemingly disparate” experiences into an intimate chronicle punctuated by loss, desperation, and trauma. Besides reflecting on yoga, he reveals the recurring depression and “erratic, disconnected, unrelenting” thoughts that led to an unexpected diagnosis; his four-month hospitalization in a psychiatric ward, during which he received electroshock therapy; his motivation for, and process of, writing; a stay on the Greek island of Leros, where he taught writing to teenage refugees, whose fraught journeys and quiet dreams he portrays with warmth and compassion; his recollection of a tsunami in Sri Lanka, which he wrote about in Lives Other Than My Own; an intense love affair; and, at last, a revival of happiness. Carrère had planned to call his yoga book Exhaling, which could serve for this memoir as well: There is a sense of relief and release in his effort to make sense of his evolving self.
Reality and imagination infuse a probing memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-374-60494-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2022
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
