Though Ricoeur can arguably take some credit for making ``hermeneutics'' a buzzword in graduate seminars, Reagan's passably informative, slightly schizoid book isn't likely to increase awareness of the eminent philosopher. Still writing thick, erudite, and deliberative philosophical works at 83, Ricoeur is enjoying a steadily growing reputation as one of the most influential of living French philosophers. Reagan (Philosophy/Kansas State Univ.), who shares with Jacques Derrida the distinction of having had Ricoeur as a teacher, lets his respect for the philosopher and pacifist water down not only the biographic details here but the intellectual side as well. This patchy work is broken up into four unsatisfying sections—a colorless biographical essay, Reagan's own personal memoir of Ricoeur, an uninspired prÇcis of Ricouer's recent work Oneself as Another, and four interviews. Ricoeur's brand of ``anthropological philosophy'' apart, an intimate, subjective approach would have been justified for a leader of the phenomenological school, even if he insists on the importance of the work over the life. Admittedly, Ricoeur's work tends to be learned, dry, and difficult: an essay on Freud, studies of the symbolism of evil, explorations of the sources of human volition and of time as narrative. But Reagan's glosses are drier still. Ricoeur's life, on the other hand, has crucial moments that Reagan lets pass without much scrutiny: his imprisonment as a soldier in WW II, risky notoriety as a pacifist during the Algerian war, professional battles with fellow philosophers and psychoanalysts in the 1960s, and collisions with student radicals in 1968 while he was serving as a university administrator. A thin book on a dense philosopher, wavering between sycophantic tones and ponderous discourse.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-70602-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1996
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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