Appealing reading for those interested in memoirs about the Camino de Santiago and other epic modern-day treks.
A journalist chronicles his month-long, 500-mile trek with his grown son along one of the world's most famous pilgrim routes.
Sibley's (Northern Spirits: John Watson, George Grant, and Charles Taylor—Appropriations of Hegelian Political Thought, 2008, etc.) accounts of his trip were originally published as a series of articles in 2000 in the Ottawa Citizen, where the author is an award-winning senior writer. At 57, "an age when memories claimed more and more of [his] waking thoughts," Sibley followed through on a promise that he would take his son Daniel on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, or the Way of St. James, a journey beginning in France and ending in Spain, after Daniel's college graduation. He makes clear this isn't a guidebook, instead referring to his story as a "phenomenology of pilgrimage." Sibley occasionally converses with people along the way and during evening stays at hostels, but the bulk of the narrative tracks his internal monologue. He toils with a series of existential issues, ruminating on life's necessities, his desire to conquer the mountains, the trail's rich history and his own long-forgotten memories. He quotes a wide variety of writers, including T.S. Eliot, St. Thomas Aquinas and Pico Iyer, to name just a few. During the journey, his physical discomfort dissipated and his mind quieted, although his secret hopes that the divine would be revealed remained unfulfilled. Sibley has a finely tuned appreciation for close-to-the-ground details, and his descriptions are deep and sincere without being overly earnest.
Appealing reading for those interested in memoirs about the Camino de Santiago and other epic modern-day treks.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3315-3
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Virginia
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2012
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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