An often moving defense of the need for religion in modern times.
A Soviet-born doctor reflects on a life devoted to Judaism.
Tsesis (Communist Daze, 2017) writes that his parents grew up in the Jewish faith but were compelled to hide their religious allegiance under authoritarian Soviet rule. As a result, the author observes, their commitment to their Jewish faith atrophied, and their suppressed spirituality eventually became absent. Tsesis grew up as a cultural but not actively religious Jew, for the most part, but even as a young man, he experienced a profound attraction to religion; at one point, he tells of having a dream in which he encountered the “intuitive awareness of Divine Presence.” As he experienced ferocious anti-Semitism in his life, he remained impressed by the irrepressibility of faith and the historical adaptability of the Jewish people. His memoir is more an assemblage of essays than it is a linear, comprehensive autobiography, as he not only records his life of faith, but also furnishes a rational explanation of it. According to Tsesis, only the reality of a monotheistic god could ever adequately account for the “miraculous diversity of our amazing world.” In often poetical and rousing terms, he pits his deep appreciation of the “unfathomable mystery of existence” against communistic ideology and dogmatic atheism. He even provides an anatomy of what he sees as the limitations of Darwin’s theory of evolution, accepting many of its chief principles but denying that it captures the full spectrum of human experience. Tsesis’ life is a memorably eventful one, deeply affected by the modern rise of totalitarianism. He recounts his spiritual awakening with a combination of philosophical wonder and openhanded emotion—which makes for a stirring combination. In particular, his account of living under Soviet rule is extraordinary; while he was a physician in Odessa, he says, he was asked to lead a “scientific atheism study group.” However, he occasionally indulges his own brand of dogmatism, heavy-handedly branding atheism a “false religion,” equating it with “naïve simplicity,” and accusing it of reducing life to “pointless vanity.”
An often moving defense of the need for religion in modern times.Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-89733-732-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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