An interesting find, but not a real trouvaille. These notebooks, just recently discovered, date from the months Sartre spent as a "mobilized reservist" in Alsace during the Phony War. They were meant, he suggests toward the end, "to accentuate the isolation I was in, and the rupture between my past and present lives." This caesura, however, had little drama in itself, and much of the material in it can be found in more polished form in Being and Nothingness (1943) and The Words (1964), not to mention the earlier Nausea (1938). Still the curiously appealing, even pathetic features of Sartre the atheistic saint seen in The Words (and elsewhere, such as de Beauvoir's Adieux) often light up some otherwise perfunctory pages. On one of these Sartre mockingly celebrates his triumphs as a prepubertal lover: "I insist on the fact that I wasn't yet ugly. I had fine, fair hair and plump cheeks; my squint wasn't yet very visible. Let us say rather that, even if I wasn't ugly, with sure instinct I was getting ready to be so." Sartre registers his embarrassment and disgust at the sight of male bodies, including his own. He does an unintentionally comic, high-powered psychological analysis of his desperate, losing attempts to diet. He struggles and strains in his never-ending effort to be "authentic," like a medieval monk seeking purity of intention. He endlessly denigrates himself: "I feel no solidarity with anything, not even with myself: I don't need anybody or anything. . . Truly what the Nazis call 'the abstract man of the pluto-democracies'." Yet for a man who claims to be a stranger to intimacy, Sartre displays a good deal of affection (and a great deal of discretion) in recounting his affairs with de Beauvoir and other women. The many long philosophical sections of the notebooks would be impressive ii he hadn't reworked them elsewhere. As it is, they tend to jar with the more personal entries, as Sartre primly/pedantically shifts gears: "I return to time." "I must begin to set my ideas about morality in order." Nonetheless, some of those ideas on morality, such as his rejection of stoicism as a violent form of self-deception, are striking. Important as a document—if not a major event.
Pub Date: April 2, 1985
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1985
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
