An evenhanded, sympathetic biography of a defiant thinker.
A perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) became “an icon almost overnight” after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a book that former Esquire fiction editor Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 2009) praises as “the most passionate, complex, moving, and influential account ever written of the clash between civilization and official barbarism in twentieth-century Europe.” It also was Arendt’s first book in English, the language she learned with some difficulty after arriving in New York in 1941, a refugee from Germany and Vichy France. By the 1950s, Arendt established a reputation as an outspoken political theorist in essays on anti-Semitism, German existentialism, and minority rights that appeared in prestigious publications that included Contemporary Jewish Record, Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. New York intellectuals were smitten by the woman Alfred Kazin called “a blazing Jew.” Arendt seemed the perfect writer to report for the New Yorker on the trial, in 1963, of Nazi SS Officer Adolf Eichmann, but her articles, followed by the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, generated outrage. Friends, allies, and colleagues accused her of “moral deafness. Instead of damning Eichmann as the embodiment of evil, she portrayed him as a new “ ‘mass man,’ a universal, postindustrial, semi-Marxian type who was characteristically lonely, rootless, socially adrift, economically expendable, and susceptible to both nihilism and authoritarianism.” After her death, when her love affair with philosopher and Nazi party member Martin Heidegger became known, critics accused her of “Jewish ‘self-hatred.’ ” Heller judiciously places both scandals in the context of Arendt’s youth in Germany, where she felt exempt from anti-Semitic remarks directed mostly to Eastern European Jews; her education as a philosopher; her struggles with Zionism and her own Jewish identity; and her prolific writings on violence, truth, and political discourse.
An evenhanded, sympathetic biography of a defiant thinker.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-45619-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amazon Publishing/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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