The 1949 exorcism that inspired William Blatty to write The Exorcist, recounted in admirably restrained and documented fashion by an unlikely source: military-expert Allen (Merchants of Treason, 1988, etc.). Unlike Blatty's possessed teenage girl, 14-year-old Robbie Mannheim (a pseudonym) of Mt. Ranier, Maryland, doesn't swivel his head like a top or levitate. But when fruit and then a vase fly through the air in his presence, his middle-class parents call on an M.D., a psychologist, and finally a minister for help. The minister suspects a poltergeist, but when bloody scratches appear on Robbie's body, the reverend tells the family, ``You have to see a Catholic priest. The Catholics know about things like this''- -advice that leads the Mannheims to a local priest whose exorcism of Robbie aborts when the boy slashes him with a mattress spring. The distraught parents take their son to St. Louis, where they meet Fr. William S. Bowdern, a 52-year-old Jesuit attached to St. Louis University. It's Bowdern who conducts the successful weeks-long exorcism, involving nightly incantations by the priest and several assistants as Robbie—who claims to be possessed—spits, urinates, writhes, cackles, and manifests words in blood (``HELL''; ``CHRIST'') on his body until the ``demon'' departs shortly after Easter. To his credit, Allen reports the more sensational aspects of Robbie's ordeal with a poker face, focusing instead on the spiritual and emotional issues involved, providing brief histories of the Jesuits, poltergeists, and possession. In an afterword, he weighs—without judging—the likelihood of Robbie having been possessed, and he discusses his sources, including one eyewitness and, crucially, a hitherto unrevealed daily journal of the exorcism kept by one of Bowdern's assistants. One can't blame Blatty for sleazing up Robbie's plight, but it's good to have Allen's levelheaded account, which allows the apparent facts of this influential case to speak for their own—and compelling—selves.
Pub Date: July 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-42034-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1993
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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