A practical testament to the significance of the questioning mind.
How the art of the inquiry can transform ideas into action.
Journalist and advertising guru Berger (Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, 2009) examines the science of questioning and the ways in which the world’s top innovators have used it to their advantage. Establishing a “culture of inquiry” is a prudent move for both producer and consumer, writes the author, who cleverly examines the impact the “Whys, What Ifs, and Hows” have on the development of products like snow shovels, baby carrots and Crackerjack, among many others. Berger explores how, in asking “the question that defined the problem,” struggling entrepreneurs have moved from product conception to profitable execution. Begun as a website assisted by volunteers and researchers, Berger’s book expands further on questioning as a skilled art form that can be polished to gain its maximum benefits, even though the author finds its usage underutilized in today’s electronic multimedia age. Berger makes great use of both historical and contemporary examples of educators, innovators and business moguls who, by taking time to ask pointed questions of themselves and their respective industries, have both broadened their understandings of challenging situations and expanded the range of positive possibilities. Rhetorically (and hypothetically) asking the right questions also enabled entrepreneurs to establish wildly successful businesses like Netflix (“What if the video-rental business were run like a health club?”) or game-changing inventions like the microwave oven (“Could the energy from the radio waves be used to actually cook food?”). The author also touches on the reasons why we stop asking pertinent questions as we age and the ways parents can inspire inquisitiveness in children. If asking questions demonstrates an open willingness to know, Berger writes, the answers have the power to dispel ignorance.
A practical testament to the significance of the questioning mind.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62040-145-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2014
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
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