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
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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