by Richard Fletcher ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2004
Smoothly written and useful in understanding events of the past—and present.
A well-tempered survey of nearly a thousand years of Muslim-Christian interaction—most of it unhappy.
Medievalist Fletcher (The Barbarian Conversion, 1998, etc.) apologizes at the outset for the overused title (“I . . . venture the modest hope that the present work will be considered worthy of inclusion among the Hundred Best Books called The Cross and the Crescent”) and a slight anachronism within it, in that the crescent did not become the symbol for Islam until the Ottoman era. Those are the only apparent flaws in this lively overview, which does not shy from touching on fundamental issues that divide the two “peoples of the book”: Islam’s bewilderment that there could be such a thing as a God split into three aspects (“What else is a God . . . who can turn himself into a man or a dove or a lamb but some form of polytheism or idolatry”); Christianity’s rejection of Islam’s austere monotheism; the two religions’ widely divergent ways of looking at civil authority as against that of the divine. As Fletcher notes, history has seen plenty of instances of peaceful coexistence among the faithful; he writes, for instance, that the so-called Captive Churches were anything but, given full freedom to operate under Islamic dispensation, and that “in the central Islamic lands of the Fertile Crescent . . . Christian and Muslim cooperated fruitfully in tilling the contiguous, often overlapping fields of professional service and intellectual exchange.” Yet this collegiality disappeared with the rise of both doctrinaire movements and increased military friction, as Saracens raided into France and Italy and Christian emperors fought crusades and wars of “reconquest.” In the end, Christian Europe overshadowed the Muslim world through technological and commercial advances, the most important of which, Fletcher holds, was the printing press, a forbidden instrument in Islamic lands. “The rise of the West took the world of Islam by surprise,” he concludes. “Given Islamic disdain for the West, perhaps it had to happen thus.”
Smoothly written and useful in understanding events of the past—and present.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03271-9
Page Count: 183
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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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 Albert Camus ; translated by Justin O'Brien & Sandra Smith
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by Albert Camus ; translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy & Justin O'Brien
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by Albert Camus translated by Arthur Goldhammer edited by Alice Kaplan
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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