One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer’s...
A diffuse tale of spiritual misadventure.
A supposed holy man, camped with cultish followers in a remote corner of Arizona, dallies with a student/colleague. In a Clinton-esque twist, he maintains that he has not had sex with her, a mortal, but with the goddess she embodies and thus remains celibate. The student/goddess leaves him to take up with a coreligionist. The two leave the community for exile in the nearby mountains, where he dies of exposure. That’s just the barest outline of a tale that becomes stranger with each added detail. Heavily reported in the New York Times, Rolling Stone and other outlets, the story was yet another in a long list of cautionary examples about the dangers of cults. Bringing little new to the account and underemphasizing the guru’s outlier status in the topography of Buddhism in the West, Carney (The Red Market: On the Trail of the World's Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers, and Child Traffickers, 2011) adds value mostly in his considerations of what motivates people to yield to the will of potentially dangerous leaders: “Looked at from one perspective, his plunge toward enlightenment is an obvious case of madness. Yet lurking in the shadows of the cave where he died are clues about the idiosyncratic reasons Americans have adapted Eastern mysticism to their own ends.” It’s a potentially fruitful path, but Carney stumbles around on it, the narrative becoming a loosely connected set of observations on how meditation works and how weird true believers can be.
One has the sense that the author set out to write a kind of rejoinder to Into the Wild, but the result lacks Jon Krakauer’s sense of insight into what drives people in their quest of something beyond.Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59240-861-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
Vintage Wills—a strong interpretive framework, vigorous prose and big, provocative arguments.
In this learned, impassioned jeremiad, Pulitzer Prize–winning Wills (What Jesus Meant, 2006, etc.) traces two styles of Protestantism throughout American history and sounds the alarm about evangelicalism.
During the Revolutionary era, the Enlightenment religious culture, which made possible the disestablishment of churches and gave birth to Transcendentalism, valued reason and tolerance. Evangelical emotionalism, on the other hand, which came to prominence in the religious revivals of the early 19th century, emphasizes feeling and teaches people to know God with their hearts rather than to scrutinize religion with their brains. The history of American Christianity, suggests Wills, can be viewed as a tug of war between those two impulses. Some of the freshest material here is the author’s discussion of the mid-20th-century “great truce between the religious communities,” in which different religious groups adopted an ecumenical friendliness and the nation seemed to settle into a comfortable state of being politely “Judeo-Christian.” By contrast, Wills’ treatment of post-1960s evangelicalism is thin, and ignores the political diversity within theologically conservative churches. The great truce was short-lived, however, and the present moment illustrates the dangers of unchecked evangelicalism. President Bush has allowed religion to shape his administration’s approach to social services, health, science and, of course, war—he has, says Wills, betrayed and endangered Enlightenment Christianity. Despite his pessimism about the current administration, the author concludes on a hopeful note. Evangelical passion and Enlightenment intellectual rigor are not mutually exclusive, he says. Indeed, they are often present in the same church. Although it is “hard to strike the right balance between the two religious tendencies,” that “precarious but persisting balance” of piety and reason is precisely what Americans ought to cultivate.
Vintage Wills—a strong interpretive framework, vigorous prose and big, provocative arguments.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-59420-146-2
Page Count: 552
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This exploration of the roots of violence in human society finds a villain in biology: not in the genetic urge that drives each organism to reproduce, but in the forces that create larger "superorganisms" that seek to perpetuate themselves. Bloom (whose credentials range from cancer research at Roswell Park Memorial Cancer Research Institute to experimental graphics, programmed learning, and founding a public relations firm that represented many well-known rock artists) draws on an impressive range of historical, anthropological, and biological research to support his thesis. (The 333 pages of text are followed by an additional 117 pages of notes and bibliography.) From this massive body of material, he arrives at a conclusion that such philosophers as Hobbes would find congenial: Aggression is not an aberrant force in society, but its very foundation. From Caesar to Khomeini, Bloom finds that those who have lead great nations are propagators of memes—the core bodies of a culture's key ideas that are the ideological equivalent of genes. History is not so much the contest of armies as of memes, and a strong meme drives out the weak as surely as the genes of an alpha male in a chimpanzee herd dominate those of his lesser competitors. While Bloom often gives cogent analyses of the currents of history, his thesis has an unfortunate potential for being warped to the service of chauvinism and racism. His attempts to draw lessons for the future (with comments on the predatory nature of Muslim society or the inability of African nations to transcend their tribal memes) are dubious at best, and potentially inflammatory at worst. And his ideas are often developed more by example than by exploration of their deeper consequences. Bloom's basic thesis is thought-provoking and often full of valuable insight; it is unfortunate that the implications he derives from it are so likely to encourage the worst aspects of human nature to come to the fore.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-87113-532-9
Page Count: 454
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 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.
