Kierkegaard’s great fear was that later thinkers would cram his life’s work into a two-paragraph précis; Hannay has gone to...
An intellectual biography of Denmark’s second-most famous melancholic.
Hannay (Philosophy/Univ. of Oslo) has produced several works on Kierkegaard, one of the 19th century’s most iconoclastic thinkers, and he has translated many of Kierkegaard’s books into English. Here he applies his formidable knowledge of the philosopher’s work to the task of grounding it in the minutiae of the man’s life. From the outset Hannay admits that many will dispute the relevance of his project, and those who believe that the story of an author’s life sheds no light on the meaning of his works will find little to savor here. Those of other theoretical persuasions will be richly rewarded, however. Moving chronologically through Kierkegaard’s life with somewhat breathtaking familiarity, the author deftly isolates the influences that specific events had on his thinking. Most interestingly, the Danish-speaking Hannay is able to situate Kierkegaard in his Copenhagen milieu, revealing local, often petty battles where others have seen earthshaking disputes with Great European Thinkers. The problem with Hannay’s approach, however, is that in the end not terribly much happened to Kierkegaard. Apart from the well-known jilting of his fiancée (which effectively began his writing career) and the self-immolating attack on the church (which ended it), Kierkegaard’s adult life was surprisingly uneventful. Twenty years of studying German philosophers and writing like a fiend produced some fascinating books, but it did not make for riveting biography. Furthermore, the breadth of Hannay’s knowledge occasionally pushes him towards the hagiographic; he tends to find a rationale for every utterance of Kierkegaard’s, no matter how small or strange, despite the strong possibility that Kierkegaard (with his love of pseudonyms and propensity for depression) may have been a bit unstable. For those with the patience and willingness to work their way through, though, a remarkably nuanced, delicately drawn picture of Kierkegaard’s thought eventually emerges here.
Kierkegaard’s great fear was that later thinkers would cram his life’s work into a two-paragraph précis; Hannay has gone to great lengths to prevent that from ever happening.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-521-56077-2
Page Count: 489
Publisher: Cambridge Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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