A delightful discourse on an extraordinarily full life: Rogers succeeds in capturing the spirit of a philosophical maverick...
A sympathetic treatment of one of the 20th century’s best-known British philosophers.
When the chips are down it might be as tempting to criticize a philosopher who failed in his bold attempts to simply end philosophy as it previously had been to praise him when the stridence of his claims first caused tremors in the academic community. But Rogers’s (Pascal, 1999, not reviewed) impeccably researched examination of the Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer remains true to its course, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of this celebrity intellect without slipping into the now-fashionable rut of outright dismissal. Giving due weight to Ayer’s life outside of philosophy (his experience as a Jew at Eton, his military service in WWII, his dedicated, lifelong involvement in British politics, and his seemingly innumerable love affairs), the author’s humane portrait skillfully conveys the contagious energy of Ayer’s joie de vivre without condemning him for ultimately lacking the intellectual weight of a Bertrand Russell or Ludwig Wittgenstein. Now that logical positivism and linguistic philosophy have fallen out of vogue, such thorough coverage of Ayer’s work reminds us that much of this quick-witted philosopher’s vast influence on 20th-century philosophy was as a regular teacher—the best, many students insisted, that they ever had. A virtuoso debater whose passion for argument was matched perhaps only by his emotional distance from friends and lovers, Ayer often seems a study in contrasts. “There is philosophy, which is about conceptual analysis—about the meaning of what we say,” Rogers quotes Ayer as saying, “and there is all of this—all of life.” If we sometimes get the impression that Ayer tried simply to eliminate the problems of philosophy, to portray them as needless misunderstandings, rather than attempting to actually solve them, Rogers teaches us at least to appreciate that Ayer’s primary interest in razing the philosophical superstructure was in order to better get on with devoting himself to “all of this—all of life.”
A delightful discourse on an extraordinarily full life: Rogers succeeds in capturing the spirit of a philosophical maverick who many loved to hate.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8021-1673-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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 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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