by William Kittredge ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2000
A carefully constructed memory palace almost as comfortable for its visitors as it is for its inhabitant.
Kittredge (Hole in the Sky, 1992, etc.) continues his explorations, identifying the ingredients of a good and worthy life as he mines them from recollections of his early years.
Exposure to the world and analysis of experience are not just antidotes to despair—they are ways of living, of helping us to attain a private understanding of our own stories and so a ration of freedom and happiness. Kittredge takes readers on a select tour of his experiences, from the early days with his father to those he shares today with his companion, Annick Smith, during which he is ever attentive to the resonant metaphors of daily life. Sometimes his descriptions can sound painfully studied, as if each word were a Claymore mine ready to compromise his rough poet image: “. . . tricksters and jazz next to manicured gardens in Kyoto, walled cities against wilderness, and island empires that evolve into commodified carnivals.” But more often his writing is richly contextualized, a dizzily inclusive response to experience (be it garnered in the caves at Lascaux or the Alhambra or the hills and swales of his Montana home) that swarms and rushes and finds no problem stirring into a discussion of, say, the roots and downsides of agriculture such elements as the Greek alphabet, violence among hunter-gatherers, the humanity that can be wrung from a hard life, and the greasy buckskins of John Colter. We can ignore the excesses, however, and tap into Kittredge’s abiding decency, his love of intimacy and the pleasures and rewards of giving, in a life in which “the great projects have to do with freedom from want, ignorance, disease, and despotisms, with a peaceful homeland thick with the textures of what is most beloved, and with tearing down the barricades between ourselves and liberty, pleasure, enfranchisement, release, and play.”
A carefully constructed memory palace almost as comfortable for its visitors as it is for its inhabitant.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-679-43752-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
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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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