A detailed compendium of facts and ideas that’s not lucid or comprehensive enough to be useful for a wide readership.
An opaque discussion of the Quran and its application to modern problems.
In this history and analysis of Islam and the Quran, Mustapha has a clear mission: convince his readers that understanding the holy text and following the Prophet Muhammad is the way to achieve personal and global happiness. He writes that the Quran “is essentially a guidance delivering man from darkness into light; it has no substitute.” The book offers interpretations of various verses in the Quran and their relationship to life today. Mustapha’s argument leads to the suggestion that a renewed following of Muhammad—led by “the children of Israel” and the establishment of a new caliphate— is the solution to global tensions such as the Occupy movement and the European debt crisis. Arriving at that controversial conclusion, however, is a struggle. The book is packed with references to events and figures from Islamic history; readers without the relevant background knowledge will find themselves overwhelmed by names and terminology. Quotations from the Quran serve as the author’s primary source of proof for his claims, so readers of a dissimilar faith are unlikely to find his arguments compelling. As a whole, the book seems more like a starting place for further research than a complete treatise. One footnote reads: “This is a very profound description of the Sunna that needs careful analysis,” yet that analysis isn’t explicit in the text. Instead, the author often relies on strings of rhetorical questions, which, although a useful study guide for a devoted student, are of little use to the lay reader. Ultimately, it’s unclear who the intended audience is: Readers familiar with the subject will likely already comprehend much of this book’s content, and those unfamiliar with it (or of uncertain faith) may be alienated by the author’s sweeping frame of reference and uncompromising perspective.
A detailed compendium of facts and ideas that’s not lucid or comprehensive enough to be useful for a wide readership.Pub Date: May 18, 2012
ISBN: 9781467883931
Page Count: 174
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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