This wonderful rendering of Boswell digs deep into his probing, enquiring life and the fast friends he made at every turn.
James Boswell (1740-1795) comes to life in Zaretsky’s (French History/Univ. of Houston; A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning, 2013) recounting of his European grand tour in the mid-18th-century.
Boswell’s search for the answers of the Enlightenment began in his Edinburgh school days. On a short holiday in southern Scotland, he began to keep a journal, a habit that scholars have benefited from ever since. Raised in the strict Calvinist religion, for a period he considered Catholicism, until his father threatened to disown him. He had the greatest minds of the time to help him search for answers: David Hume, Adam Smith, Knox, Hobbes and Francis Hutcheson. A year in London brought him to a chance meeting with Samuel Johnson, who became a lifelong friend in addition to Boswell’s biographical subject. Zaretsky follows Boswell’s travels through Europe as he honed his tactic of throwing himself at the Enlightenment thinkers he wished to meet. He became great friends with Rousseau and his nemesis, Voltaire. Perfecting the art of being easygoing and chatty, he picked the brains of the great minds of his time. The English exile John Wilkes and Corsican rebel general Pasquale Paoli showed him the meaning of freedom and changed his outlook on life. Boswell also suffered from lifelong depression—an affliction shared by Johnson—and wrote dozens of essays on the subject. Without deep, confusing discussion of philosophical issues, Zaretsky introduces the Enlightenment greats who taught and molded Boswell. The vast store of knowledge our traveler absorbed in so few years makes for truly enlightening reading. “Boswell matters not because his mind was as original or creative as the men and women he pursued,” writes the author, “but because his struggle to make sense of his life…appeals to our own needs and sensibilities.”
This wonderful rendering of Boswell digs deep into his probing, enquiring life and the fast friends he made at every turn.Pub Date: March 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-674-36823-1
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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
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
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