The book, while missing features useful to general readers, remains a clear and sometimes eloquent introduction to the life...
A generally sympathetic treatment, though also attentive to those many occasions when Emperor Freud wore no clothes.
Kramer (Psychiatry and Human Behavior/Brown Univ.; Against Depression, 2005, etc.) takes on the Godfather of psychoanalysis in this entry in the Eminent Lives series. The author’s prose—clear, precise, jargon-free—is well-suited to the task, but the volume, principally an intellectual biography, offers little scholarly apparatus (no endnotes, bibliography or index) and is missing a chronology of Freud’s life and a list of his important publications. Kramer spends much of the text discussing—very amiably—Freud’s failures as a scientist and a therapist. He properly praises Freud for his ferocious determination to illuminate the structure and workings of the human mind, but he also notes that Freud manufactured evidence, ignored conflicting data, misrepresented cases repeatedly and was frequently wrong. Kramer examines some of Freud’s most famous cases (e.g., the “Rat Man,” the “Wolf Man”) and discusses Freud’s procrustean determination to make his data fit his theory. He credits Freud for some useful vocabulary (transference, displacement) and for his narrative skills, but Freud comes across as ambitious, intolerant, petty, vindictive. And astonishingly hardworking: he wrote his books between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. after a full day of consultation and study. Kramer is not much interested in the quotidian detail of Freud’s life. We do learn a little about his marriage, his children (daughter Anna comes off well), his books (Kramer sometimes fails to provide a publication date), his painful (and losing) battle with cancer of the mouth and the rise and fall of his friendship with one-time disciple Carl Jung.
The book, while missing features useful to general readers, remains a clear and sometimes eloquent introduction to the life and thought of the world’s first shrink.Pub Date: Nov. 21, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-059895-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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
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