by Susan Zuccotti ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2013
A bright light within a dark, deeply distressing time in history.
Zuccotti (Holocaust Odysseys: The Jews of Saint-Martin-Vesubie and Their Flight through France and Italy, 2007, etc.) pursues the undercover work by a French priest in aiding the Jews in Marseille and then Rome elude capture and death by the Nazis during World War II.
While Père Marie-Benoît’s (1895–1990) activities have been widely celebrated since the war, the extent of his network was not well-documented, and his benevolent motivation toward the Jews was not explained. Born in western France, an isolated, Catholic agricultural area twice overrun by radical republicans in French history, leaving the inhabitants tending toward monarchist views, he early on empathized with the state of being a “persecuted minority within a hostile state” and was attracted to the simple lifestyle of the Franciscan friars. After he served with distinction during World War I, his scholarly, reflective life was again interrupted by strife. Between May 1940 and June 1943, he lived and worked in the monastery of the Capuchins in Marseille, building a secret network, with associates Joseph Bass and Angelo Donati, to shelter the foreign Jews taking refuge in France. Transferred to Rome, perhaps because his work was growing too dangerous and visible, Marie-Benoît helped Jews secure documents and funds to elude roundup and deportation, earning the epithet “father of the Jews” by his protégés, as he called them. Also known as Padre Benedetto, he helped save the lives of at least 2,500 people, acting out of a true loathing for anti-Semitism. “Above all,” writes Zuccotti, “his wartime experience reveals much about the phenomenon of Jewish rescue during the Holocaust.”
A bright light within a dark, deeply distressing time in history.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-253-00853-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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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