Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring—among the best of innumerable Freud bios.
A significant biography with more than the usual emphasis on the vagaries of the subject’s reputation.
Prolific novelist and clinical psychologist Tallis, whose most recent nonfiction book was The Act of Living, declares that few major thinkers have been more vilified than Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). However, writes the author, “extreme Freud bashing” is offset by equally “unhelpful,” overly reverent followers. An admirer but definitely not a worshipper, Tallis provides an expert portrait of a brilliant, obsessive, ruthless figure who was “right about some things and wrong about others.” He was also a talented yet “very uneven” writer whose scientific papers are often an exercise in “narrative embellishment and opportunistic misrepresentation.” An ambitious young neurologist in an era when psychological disorders were viewed as brain disease, Freud was not the first to consider them the result of traumatic memories or to employ the “talking cure,” but his charisma, energy, and literary skills produced “a new way of understanding the mind, relationships, history and culture.” Freud’s later writings demonstrate that colleagues were outraged at first and shunned him, but Tallis writes bluntly that this is fiction. Vienna’s late-19th-century Golden Age was open to new ideas in the arts and sciences, and Freud soon attracted a loyal following. By the time of his 1909 U.S. tour, he was an international celebrity. Since his death, neuroscience and therapeutic advances have not been kind to some of his theories, and some readers may agree with Tallis’ comparison to Karl Marx. Both revealed genuine insights into the human condition that don’t translate into practical benefits. Marxist economics has a poor record, and psychoanalysis is not “a cure—or, as cures go, not a very good one.” Yet Freud remains a profound influence on modern culture.
Convincingly critical and convincingly admiring—among the best of innumerable Freud bios.Pub Date: March 26, 2024
ISBN: 9781250288950
Page Count: 496
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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