Unlikely to find much readership outside of the psychoanalytic hardcore.
Psychobiography meets psychiatric case study in this life of the eminently strange theorist.
Wilhelm Reich (1897–1957) was, writes Corrington (Theology/Drew Univ.), one of the most brilliant of Sigmund Freud’s epigones, a thinker who managed to make sexuality even more central to psychoanalytical theory than the master envisioned or intended. Reich, however, also concocted theories that, far from being merely radical, come up on the other side of bizarre: the quackish “orgone box,” which purported to capture what Corrington calls “a new form of massless energy,” a notion that Albert Einstein roundly dismissed, but that certain strands of New Agers have sworn by ever since; equally quackish anticancer therapies that eventually landed him in jail; the repeated assertion, toward the end of his life, that “the more genital potency a person has, the more of nature and its laws he or she will see.” Though Reich wrote such once influential and still timely books as The Mass Psychology of Fascism and The Function of the Orgasm, he is condemned and forgotten today, considered by some to be an unfortunate victim of paranoid schizophrenia. Corrington’s civilian effort (he is a philosopher, not a physician) to champion Reich as an unduly overlooked revolutionary thinker is valiant but ultimately unconvincing; no amount of explaining away can make Reich’s self-identification with Christ or tinkering with pseudoscience any more palatable, and Corrington’s attempts to suggest that “orgone energy” is at least a possibility (“how can we know something that has no real contrast term or reality”) will make any rationalist smirk. Perhaps without meaning to, Corrington manages to assemble plenty of evidence along the way that Reich had come unhinged somewhere in the course of a tormented and fearful life. In the end, his portrait of the Austrian thinker will probably not convert many to Reich’s cause—but may instead provoke pity and sympathy over talents wasted and bridges burned.
Unlikely to find much readership outside of the psychoanalytic hardcore.Pub Date: July 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-25002-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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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