A British popularizer of philosophy, Magee (coauthor, On Blindness, 1995, etc.), writes an overblown account of his lifelong interest in philosophical ideas. The book's title and subtitle capture its two interrelated aims: to confess the existential traumas that led the author to philosophy and to summarize the key ideas of Western metaphysics and epistemology. Magee, a former academic, wants to show that philosophy comes in answer to acutely felt problems about the nature of reality and human knowing. Magee's own angst over death, meaninglessness, and the limits of human knowledge would be more convincing if he showed less satisfaction in his previously published writings and more restraint in condemning strictly academic (especially British analytic) philosophy. The confessions include tantalizing hints of ``exhilarating love affairs''; but, despite his insistence on the philosophic importance of sex, Magee provides no details about his affectional life. Was philosophy irrelevant to this side of his life, or does he forget that, for the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles, love was itself a metaphysical principle? But Empedocles apparently doesn't belong to the mere ``half a dozen'' philosophers in each century ``whose work is of widespread and lasting interest.'' To this elite group, Kant, Schopenhauer, Bertrand Russell, and Karl Popper do clearly belong, in the author's judgment: Kant, for articulating so persuasively how much conceptions influence perceptions; Schopenhauer for his philosophy of art; Russell for his logic; Popper for his science. Magee is best at presenting the ideas of these, his favorites, but he could have done so in a much shorter book and without the melodramatic portrayals of his own intellectual suffering.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-50028-6
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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