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CHARGING AHEAD

AN ELECTRIC CAR THAT GOES THE DISTANCE

A fitfully interesting case study of the collision of alternative technology, big business, and government. Automotive business writer Sherman (In The Rings of Saturn, 1993) here turns to the inspiring example of a young man named James Worden, an engineering graduate of MIT, who had for years been obsessed by the thought of building an energy-efficient, safe, and affordable electric car. Armed with moral support and sweat equity from college friends who shared his vision, he founded a company called Solectria, which made several commercial automobiles, including the whimsically named Force and the user-friendly Sunrise. When the Big Three automakers found out about Worden’s work, Sherman alleges, they set to work trying to get a corner on alternative-energy legislation (their efforts to bring an electric car to market have been extensively reported on by Michael Shnayerson and others). These companies effectively edged out Worden, who survived in the market only because, in the wake of the Gulf War, the Pentagon decided to examine the prospects of building energy-efficient electric vehicles to serve under battlefield conditions. Regrettably, Sherman has trouble separating the meat of his story from incidental details, and especially from unrevealing, often irrelevant excursions in automotive history. The resulting narrative is patchy at best, plodding at worst—a misfortune, given the intrinsic merits of the story. For Worden’s vision remains attractive; who could resist, after all, the promise of a vehicle in which, —instead of hundreds of precision-engineered moving parts operating at high temperature, there were a motor with one moving part and a controller with no moving parts—? In the hands of a Tracy Kidder, this story might have become a model of literary journalism. In Sherman’s hands, it fails to move. (b&w illustrations)

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998

ISBN: 0-19-509479-4

Page Count: -

Publisher: Oxford Univ.

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998

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THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

AND OTHER ESSAYS

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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THE ART OF SOLITUDE

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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