A fascinating, at times unsettling archive for readers with a serious interest in Wittgenstein.
A legendary philosopher’s late-life correspondence lays bare the costs and consolations of love.
This extraordinary volume of letters offers an intimate portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein, not as the granite logician of legend, but as a man unguarded, needy, joyful, and often undone by love. Written between 1946 and his death in 1951, the correspondence with Ben Richards, a medical student 35 years his junior, documents what Wittgenstein called “man’s greatest happiness.” The letters are disarmingly plain; they were edited by Citron, assistant professor of religion at Princeton University, and Schmidt, assistant director-general of the Austrian National Library. The letters track weather, train times, tooth extractions, flowers coming into bloom. Dried leaves are enclosed; cartoons are sketched; music is recommended with missionary zeal. Yet threaded through this domestic hubbub is an emotional intensity that can feel unbearable at times. “I want to tell you how much I love you & how much I need you,” Wittgenstein writes, again and again. Richards’ letters strain to meet this need without being consumed by it. That imbalance is the book’s quiet drama. Wittgenstein knows he is dependent; worse, he knows his dependence can wound. A dispute over Richards growing a beard becomes a startling meditation on love, possession, and the sacredness of the beloved’s face. Elsewhere, Wittgenstein’s self-abnegation (“there is really nothing in me that is lovable”) borders on emotional blackmail. The historical context matters. Sex between men was illegal in Britain; the language available was that of “romantic friendship,” intense yet circumscribed. What survives, improbably, is joy. In his final letter, Wittgenstein thanks Richards for having made his life “different altogether.” These are love letters, and show how thinking, for Wittgenstein, was inseparable from feeling; and how love could both steady him and push him perilously close to the edge.
A fascinating, at times unsettling archive for readers with a serious interest in Wittgenstein.Pub Date: April 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781350026469
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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