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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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