Reviews for Autobiography and questions of gender

The average rating for Autobiography and questions of gender based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-06-04 00:00:00 Jarrel Hamer This book, with its intelligent and profound meditation on mortality, really helped me to cast off the baggage or shackles of the unrealistic religious notions of justice and redemption which had become absolute burdens in the face of my own experience of life and of such historical facts like the Holocaust, to me the defining moral conundrum of our age, in which for the victims there was no redeemer waiting in the wings and afterwards so little justice meted out to the perpetrators. By the time I left the monastery where I had lived and studied and loved for seven years I was an atheist, albeit a terribly reluctant one, yet I still harboured dreams (or tyrannical fantasies) within a type of secular religion, of the perfectibility of the individual, State or society with its secular beliefs of justice and redemption. But what I had experienced, and continued to do so in my new life, was imperfection and corruption, where of justice and redemption there was little sign, and where death made a final mockery of our brief lives and cherished beliefs. This little book saved my sanity. It opened my eyes to the stunning humility and honesty of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, and reconciled me to an imperfect world and has helped me deal with my fear of death. Adam Phillips gently tries to lead us away from hoping for a better world outside of this one. Like Darwin and Freud, he argues that we need to accept the world as it is, and to cast off ways of thinking which seek to redeem us. And it is through accepting death that we can do this. For both Darwin and Freud, the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from." The "religious" obsession with our need for improvement limits us and binds us to the notion that we are somehow 'faulty', Augustine's old "original sin' myth. We shall not achieve perfection so we should not seek it.And by letting go of this notion, this self-imposed burden, we are suddenly liberated to live each day to the full. And death, which is part of the package of existence, will come in its own time, becomes something far less frightening.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-17 00:00:00 Stephen Crawley Darwin's realization that much of the earth's surface is the product of earthworm excrement and Freud's antipathy to biography prompt Phillips' elegant, dense discussion on mortality and freedom. Discussions of such things as Freud's death instinct tend to lose me, and at times that was the case here. But Phillips' formulation of the two thinkers projects is probably as clearly stated as they can be and invigorating in their conclusions about nature and our place in it. A quote: "For both Darwin and Freud the idea of death saves us from the idea that there is anything to be saved from. If we are not fallen creatures, but simply creatures, we cannot be redeemed. If we are not deluded by the wish for immortality, transience doesn't diminish us." A good book to read alongside Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of.