Customer Reviews

Bushido: The Virtues of Rei and Makoto

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Bushido: The Virtues of Rei and Makoto, scientist and poet Art Stewart attempts something very new. He uses poetry to show the connections between real life, science, philosophy and human responsibility to the planet and each other. Obviously this book is difficult to summarize because of its wide and deep scope, but the author actually makes it all come together in a profoundly simple and yet important way. Imagine traces of William Carlos Williams and John Updike as well as Albert Einstein with a soundtrack by the Indigo Girls and Dave Matthews Band.

Artfully, the poems are all related in their focus on Bushido (the way of the samurai) and most use first-person perspective as one feels that Stewart, with his Peace Corps work, his scientific research and his high school and college teaching experience, has earned the right to be an instructor of modern values and responses to an ever-changing world. Using the concepts of Rei (or respect) and Makoto (truth and sincerity), the author addresses issues from stem cell research to pollution to global warming to overpopulation to teaching evolution in schools.

In "Ghanaian Story", an African man struggles to chop down rainforest to feed his family in what some would say a short-sighted and wasteful display, yet at the same time the African shows respect for life in other ways. The author implies the "if only" present in the African's contradictory behavior.

Most of the poems are seemingly stream-of-consciousness, yet closer inspection reveals their profundity and purpose. Stewart's scientific knowledge is evident, and deftly does he leap from scientific detail and obscurity to common, emotional, raw truth of experience and human intimacy. I gladly recommend this book to anyone interested in the interplay between science, emotion and life.