Elusive and private, ``the lives'' of Michel Foucault (1926- 84) include the many public roles that he assumed—as philosopher, academic, historian, political activist, and homosexual—roles that both reflected and helped shape the character of postwar France. Here, working from a thin paper trail (Foucault destroyed many of his personal documents) but with the recollections of the philosopher's former lover and friends, Macey (the scholarly Lacan in Contexts, 1988—not reviewed) offers an intellectual life of the influential thinker. Foucault—the second of three children born to a provincial physician—studied at the êcole Normale SupÇrieure, where he met Louis Althusser (The Future Lasts Forever, p. 1427) and Jacques Derrida. Although Foucault preferred Paris, where he became a celebrity, he traveled to Sweden (whose generally sedate citizens he scandalized with his drinking and his Jaguar), Tunisia, Japan, Brazil, and California, where he explored the bathhouses and contracted AIDS. Foucault shared what he called a ``passion'' with Daniel Defert, his companion from 1963 on—and the source of much of the information here. While the philosopher believed that his true self was in his works, he effaced that self with an objective style, deflecting attention away from himself and universalizing his private preoccupations. His histories of madness, prisons, and sexuality all employ a system of study that dismisses authors and individuals in favor of ``ÇpistÇmä,'' cores of ideas that Foucault pursued in what he called an ``archaeology'' of culture. Foucault, Macey makes clear, related everything from the most abstract to the most trivial in a unique way that reflected his own preoccupations, as well as that of his contemporaries: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, Barthes, LÇvi-Strauss, et al. Macey does an excellent job of tracing the development of his subject's thought, but except for Foucault's public image—shaved head, leather clothes, boyish body- -his life remains a shadow. A cautious and respectful study—avoiding luridness and gossip while preserving its subject's dignity—that Foucault himself might have authorized.
Pub Date: Jan. 25, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-43074-1
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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
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