German Philosophers in Love, from humanities professor Ettinger (MIT; Rosa Luxemburg, A Life, 1987, etc.). When Hannah Arendt was a sultry 18-year-old studying philosophy at the University of Marburg, she fell in love with Martin Heidegger, the soon-to-be-Nazi, who more or less obligingly fell in love with his Jewish student. He was in his mid-30s, married with two sons, and well known as the philosopher of Being. The steamy part of their affair lasted from 1924 until 1930 or so. She was soon in exile, and by 1933 he was a member of the Nazi Party, perhaps more out of the worst sort of opportunism than genuine ideological commitment. After the war Arendt knew something of Heidegger's craven behavior among the Nazis, including various acts of anti-Semitism within the university. Though angry at first, she was only too willing to believe his claims that he was the victim of slander and Nazi persecution. She soon warmed up to him again; remaining strangely blind to his brazen manipulation of her, she corresponded with him and visited him in Germany. Ettinger writes: ``The letters Heidegger wrote following Arendt's visits were warm, elegant, romantic, even seductive. He would recall her becoming dress, ask for her photographs, compose poems for her, remember a symphony by Beethoven they both enjoyed, describe the magic of nature, hark back to the long-ago past.'' But the reader, appetite made keen by such enticing descriptions, will want to know exactly what he said. Alas, Ettinger is stingy with quotations in general and especially miserly when it comes to the unpublished correspondence. Perhaps there are restrictions on it; she does not say. Still, the ballad of Hannah and Martin is fascinating, revealing sides of these remarkable personalities that until now have been hidden. And at a time when Arendt is finding new readers, Ettinger's little book will probably generate a new round of Arendt-bashing among old enemies.
Pub Date: Sept. 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06407-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
