A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment. (21 b&w drawings and photos)
Crossing the divide between academic analysis and insightful storytelling, this social and intellectual history explores the ideas of pragmatism by charting the lives of its founding fathers.
Pragmatism, a philosophy that makes experience the decisive test of truth and rightness, has experienced a renaissance after the chill of Cold War decades, and Menand, a New Yorker staff writer and eminent scholar, counts as one of its latter-day midwives. Significantly, then, we are told that pragmatism (with its Emersonian overtones) came into being as a radical, progressive critique of the various philosophies that fueled the American Civil War. Pragmatism’s early proponents looked upon scientific or religious belief as “one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to make a decision.” It was, therefore, a philosophy of method and process, of probability and function, and (when imbued with a constructive skepticism) it created common ground for cultivating democracy and pluralism over ideology. In his sharp and expansive appreciation of pragmatism’s formative quartet (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey), Menand brings their intermingled lives into colorful focus: Holmes goes to war, James to Brazil, Peirce becomes homeless, and Dewey helps organize the American Association of University Professors. Each takes center stage in one of the story’s first four sections, forming a sequence of eclectic biographies that accumulate a narrative tension as lives and ideas cohere or clash. A fifth section measures pragmatism’s limitations as well as its role in modernizing American thought: it cannot, for example, explain why someone would be willing to die for his beliefs, but it represents the “intellectual triumph of unionism.”
A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment. (21 b&w drawings and photos)Pub Date: May 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-19963-9
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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
© Copyright 2024 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.
