A touch more readable than Ronald Hayman’s Nietzsche (1980) and more current than Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher,...
For the nonspecialist and philosophical adept as well: an accessible, anecdotally rich life of the “trenchant idealist” who turned philosophical idealism upside-down.
Nietzsche’s life (1844–1900) offers one of the great moments of philosophy, a cry of the wounded soul: just before suffering a final descent into mental illness in 1889, he happened upon a carter beating a nag in the streets of Genoa and flung his arms around the poor beast, protecting it from further abuse. Cate (André Malraux, 1997, etc.) notes that we will probably never know what happened next, inasmuch as the first printed account of the incident appeared a couple of years after the philosopher’s death. Just so, much of Nietzsche’s life has been the subject of speculation, especially on the matter of whether Nietzsche gave ideological aid and comfort to Nazism: some scholars hold that Nietzsche’s evocation of the law-unto-himself “superman” gave Hitler and company certain ideas, whereas others believe that Nietzsche’s protofascist sister willfully altered his writings after his death, “bringing out a thick anthology of his hastily jotted but so far unpublished notes under the inflammatory title The Will to Power.” It does not help either argument, Cate notes, that Nietzsche himself was a disorderly writer easily capable of being misunderstood; but, he adds, Nietzsche had grounds for his unusual methods of composition and apothegmatic style, for he believed—correctly, as it turned out—that he was doomed to die young and did not have the time to be tidy. Such convictions also rationalize Nietzsche’s inability to handle money, his restlessness, and his devotion to the life-celebrating but feather-ruffling habits of the Dionysian personality type, an invention of Nietzsche’s that found its most celebrated follower in the composer Richard Wagner. Cate carefully explains the development of Nietzsche’s thought from Schopenhauerian acolyte to independent—and unique—thinker, some of whose most powerful work was penned before he was 30.
A touch more readable than Ronald Hayman’s Nietzsche (1980) and more current than Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974), both of which Cate complements but does not displace.Pub Date: March 25, 2005
ISBN: 1-58567-592-X
Page Count: 689
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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