The collage effect does not always serve the narrative well, but Sentilles offers plenty of facts and stories worth reading.
A sometimes-scattered though always lyrical meditation on art and artists as witnesses to war, terror, and other dark hallmarks of our time.
Imagine that the late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano—quoted at points here—had taken an interest in art and its way of interpreting and resisting history, and you have at least a flavor for Sentilles’ (Breaking Up with God, 2011, etc.) essayistic approach to some of the horrors of our time. Working through the art of one of her students, who had been stationed at Abu Ghraib, and through a conscientious objector in World War II who had been painting since youth, the author delivers small, apothegmatic pieces that sometimes approach prose poems and sometimes fit rather loosely in the narrative frame. While the statement “seventy percent of the earth is covered by water—our bodies made of nearly the same percentage” is surely true, it doesn’t add materially to how we understand the form of torture known as waterboarding, the larger issue under discussion. Sometimes the author’s refractive approach works very nicely, though, as when she observes that Stradivarius’ violins were made from defective wood sold by the Turks to their sometime enemies, the Venetians, an example of art rising from war, albeit an indirect one. It is also worth remembering, as she does, that U.N. officials covered up a tapestry reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, on display at that body’s headquarters, before Colin Powell delivered a speech making a case for war on Iraq in 2003. That war is destructive and displacing is well-known; that it yields accidental moments of beauty is, too, but Sentilles has a good eye for those arresting glints, for oddments such as the fact that the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar, California, was, in 1942, “the largest city between Los Angeles and Reno.”
The collage effect does not always serve the narrative well, but Sentilles offers plenty of facts and stories worth reading.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-59034-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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