by Tom Hodgkinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 11, 2007
The perfect antidote to those who are secretly frightened of Rhonda Byrne.
Cheeky and snotty punk philosophy from across the pond.
Founder and editor of The Idler, British grouch Hodgkinson (How to Be Idle, 2005) is mad as hell—about everything. He hates kvetchers, for example, contending that “Moaning means a shirking of responsibility. And people make money from it, particularly lawyers.” He has no love for the typical 21st-century career arc, claiming, “You start out doing work experience, you graduate to being bossed around by idiots, you become idiotic and, then, if all works out well, you end up being the idiot who bosses other people around.” He also has issues with television and wishes you would chuck yours out the window. Nor does he like rude people, which is somewhat ironic, since throughout his engaging, lucid rant on today’s society, he’s nothing if not rude. But if he were polite, what fun would that be? Hodgkinson’s sophomore effort is indeed a hoot, in a Michael-Moore-on-crack kind of way. Like Moore, he’s a well-meaning, left-leaning smarty-pants who wants to change the world by utilizing a blend of biting humor and cannily positioned facts. His structure is a bit messy—the chapters are all but interchangeable—but his prose is edgy and readable, and the energy never flags, a definite danger in this rambling format. He did a ton of research, appropriating the words and thoughts of everybody from Dante and Bertrand Russell to Greil Marcus and Ken Kesey to support his boiling rage at the medical profession, consumerism, class division, etc., etc., etc. The content is a bit on the time-sensitive side, and the book probably won’t have much punch beyond 2008, but for now, if you need a dose of quality righteous indignation, you need not look further.
The perfect antidote to those who are secretly frightened of Rhonda Byrne.Pub Date: Dec. 11, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-082322-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2007
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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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