While not plumbing all the intricacies of the ideas he cites, McGinn succeeds in elucidating their basic outlines and in...
Playful memoir offering an amusing view of academic philosophy’s day-to-day tussle, as well as a clear introduction to the author’s thought.
By his own description, McGinn (Philosophy/Rutgers) is short, in his 50s, likes to surf kayak, and is thought to look like Anthony Hopkins. This sort of self-revelation is usually anathema in the abstract realm of philosophy, but McGinn provides ample doses of it, side by side with introductory treatments of his own ideas and those of philosophers who have shaped his thinking, from St. Anselm and Descartes to Bertrand Russell, Saul Kripke, and Donald Davidson. The stated, largely fulfilled purpose of this intellectual autobiography is “to explain philosophy in an accessible, engaging way” by situating it “in its personal context.” The grandson of coalminers, McGinn grew up in working-class England, interested chiefly in rock drumming until a “switch” turned on in his teens and his attention shifted to philosophy. Believing he could never make a living at it, he majored in psychology in college, but found his way back to philosophy in graduate studies at Oxford. As a philosopher, McGinn is best known for his “mysterian” view that we lack the cognitive equipment to solve the mind-body problem; as a public intellectual, he’s familiar from appearances on television and essays in the New York Review of Books. His memoir omits love and sex, but almost everything else is up for grabs, including his one-time obsession with Ms. Pacman, his friendships (with, for example, Oliver Sacks), his frequent fallings-out (with such worthies as Daniel Dennett and Oxford University), his taste in clothes (Levi's), and a great story about Jennifer Aniston.
While not plumbing all the intricacies of the ideas he cites, McGinn succeeds in elucidating their basic outlines and in showing winningly what it’s like to be a philosopher “from the inside.”Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019792-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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