A perceptive portrait of an enigmatic thinker.
The 19th-century thinker who inspired existentialists grounded his philosophy in individual experience.
Carlisle, a London-based professor of philosophy and theology, offers an empathetic, well-grounded biography of the Danish philosopher, prolific author, and “spiritual seeker” Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). His overarching question, posed by Socrates and later taken up by 20th-century existentialists, was: “How can I be a human being in the world?” Human nature, Kierkegaard argued, “is not a fixed, timeless essence, nor a biological necessity, but a creative task for each individual life.” His conviction about personal evolution made him suspicious of marriage, the “duties, customs, expectations” required of a husband that might constrain him and impede his ability to express his spiritual life. In addition, he feared being completely open with another person. Once engaged to be married, he ended the relationship rather than reveal to his betrothed the “melancholy, the eternal night brooding,” and the “desires and excesses” that caused him great anxiety. The renouncement haunted him for the rest of his life, as did his relationship with his father, a “forbidding, complex” man whose religious ideas became antithetical to those of his son. The Lutheran Church failed to offer Kierkegaard a sacred refuge. “Does he find any more truth there,” he asked himself, “than in the theatre, or the lecture hall, or the marketplace—or have churches become the least truthful places in Christendom?” For Kierkegaard, the story of Abraham’s journey up and down Mount Moriah became emblematic of “the religious movements—the deep longing for God, the anxious struggle to understand his vocation, the search for an authentic spiritual path—that shaped his own inner life.” Rather than create a conventional chronological narrative, Carlisle moves back and forth in time to underscore how “past and future are vibrant inside us” as she judiciously mines Kierkegaard’s works and considerable scholarship to elucidate the philosopher’s life, mind, and struggles.
A perceptive portrait of an enigmatic thinker.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-374-23118-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
