Neither fish nor fowl. The footwork is a service, and the stops inherently interesting, but there’s little value added.
A personal tour of America’s roadside Christian kitsch as an earnest and at the same time a condescending religion professor (Case Western Reserve) hauls his family around the country in an RV.
It’s clear what you’re in for right from the start, when Beal (Religion and Its Monsters, 2001, etc.) uses the words “mediate other” to describe introducing his kid to a stranger, then shortly thereafter takes the time to tell us about the dealer he rented his RV from and her cute name for the RV he didn’t rent: meandering quotidian observation adorned with unnecessary academic jargon. Now a self-styled cynic, Beal was raised an evangelical Christian, and like a teenager rebelling against years of Bible camp, he’s too eager to poke fun at simple believers like the creators of Holy Land USA, a crude re-creation of biblical Jerusalem in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Though Beal intends to do for outsider religion what others have done for outsider art, “powers of wry observation” regularly get in the way (nor will his noting an inaccurate species of tree, for example, amuse many readers). He reserves greatest praise for the Precious Moments Chapel, where big-eyed kitsch brings genuine comfort to the bereaved, and for Ave Maria Grotto, where the exceedingly strange Brother Joseph built a miniature Rome. But even here, the academic’s appreciation is compromised by the apostate’s jibes. Among other stops are Orlando’s scarily Disneyfied Holy Land Experience; two biblically themed miniature golf courses; a slowly growing roadside Ark, built by a man who believes himself to be a modern Noah (a recurring theme); and Paradise Gardens, the creation of the late, celebrated folk artist Howard Finster, who illustrated albums for the Talking Heads and REM in the ’90s.
Neither fish nor fowl. The footwork is a service, and the stops inherently interesting, but there’s little value added.Pub Date: May 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-1062-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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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