A gathering and evaluation of some important data—but it's not for the casual reader.
For the dedicated and persistent, this “first full-length biography of . . . philosopher Immanuel Kant in over 50 years,” attempts to humanize the man long pictured as having no life outside the mind.
Kuehn (Philosophy/Phillips Univ.) mines the relatively sparse and sometimes untrustworthy biographical material as best he can. We learn that Kant was a whiz at billiards as a young man (earning some of his living expenses at the table), that he was welcomed into the salons of high society in his hometown of Königsberg both for his learning and his conversational ability, that he was a bit of a clothes horse, and in other ways a social animal, enjoying the company of his friends, dining, and discoursing in restaurants and pubs for many hours a day. However gregarious Kant may have been, it is inescapable that it was his cerebral and not his gustatory adventures that made him the celebrated figure that he remains. So the biographical details are matched, if not overwhelmed, by discussions of the intellectual, religious, and political influences that surrounded Kant as he lived out his long life in Königsberg. These included the Pietistic beliefs of his parents as well as the rich and provocative writings of Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau and David Hume, but also German scientists, theologians, and thinkers (many of whom had been Kant’s students). As he rose from lowly lecturer to senior professor at the University of Königsberg, Kant honed his ideas about the opposition of reason to sense, ruminating through what Kuehn calls “The Silent Years” and finally beginning to publish extensively only in his late 50s. There are lengthy excerpts from arguments made for and against Kant’s ideas by friends and rivals during this productive period. Finally, Kant began a long mental and physical deterioration leading to his death two days before his 80th birthday.
A gathering and evaluation of some important data—but it's not for the casual reader.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-521-49704-3
Page Count: 530
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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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