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
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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