From the author of The Empty Church (1996) comes another ideology-saturated piece of propaganda masquerading as history. Twentieth-Century America claims to be a college textbook, but it is really a lament about the crumbling of “traditional” values. In a chapter called “The “Best Years,—” Reeves declares that “to a great many Americans who lived through them, the years 1953 to 1963 were an especially pleasant time in this country’s history.” Before we can suggest that Betty Friedan (not to mention Rosa Parks) might take issue with his description of life under Eisenhower, Reeves quotes a 1995 journalist’s assertion that elderly women who were young mothers in the suburbs during the ’50s would “tell you those were the best years they can remember.” His portrait of the century’s close is revealing: He crows about the collapse of welfare as we know it, and wonders where have all the morals gone. Reeves relies entirely on the work of William Raspberry and Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom when discussing African-Americans in the ’90s, and he is more concerned with black participation in the sports stadium than in the voting booth (the large photograph of Michael Jordan will tell you you—re on the right page). The erosion of Christendom is a favorite theme, and in the final chapter Reeves proclaims that “the courts, in the name of the separation of church and state, were a major force in restricting the impact of the Christian faith. Among other things, they outlawed prayer in the public schools and drove Christian symbols out of public places. The highly influential New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union, among others, applauded these rulings.” Somehow, Reeves neglects to mention that the NYT’s and the ACLU’s applause was part of an international Jewish plot. If you want to learn about contemporary cultural conservatism, start here; if you—re interested in the nation’s past, skip Twentieth-Century America. (30 halftones)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-504483-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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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