A sprawling, unwieldy and uneven work.
The great-grandson of James Jackson Putnam explores the relationship between his ancestor and Freud, as revealed in family archives, in published correspondence and other writings by the principals and in existing biographies and commentaries.
Debut author Prochnik begins with a rather imaginative description of the arrival of the Viennese psychoanalyst and his colleagues, Sandor Ferenczi and Carl Jung, at Putnam’s Adirondack retreat in September 1909. Clearly out of his element in this rustic setting, where an earnest athleticism prevailed, Freud, who had just delivered his famous series of lectures on psychoanalysis at Clark University, was nevertheless eager to spread his ideas to America, and Putnam, a prominent Boston psychologist who was disenchanted with the professional practice of psychology in America, was just the man to help him do it. After their brief time together at the retreat, Freud returned to Vienna, and Putnam to Boston, where he set up his clinic as a psychoanalytic laboratory, started a program of self-analysis and began writing and lecturing widely on Freud’s ideas. The two men met again in Europe in 1911, when Freud gave Putnam a brief, intense analysis and Putnam delivered a paper at the Weimar Congress. They corresponded regularly, until Putnam’s death in 1918. The time at Putnam Camp occupies a tiny part of this dense and overwritten account, but it is the most enjoyable, vivid portion. Prochnik tries to render Putnam, the upstanding New England blue blood, interesting by revealing his long relationship with a female ex-patient—was it or wasn’t it an affair?—but the intellectual debate between Freud and Putnam is heavy going. Putnam, who had faith in God and in the good will of humanity, argued (while Freud skillfully resisted) the idea that psychoanalysis should be linked with a philosophical system and with a particular set of ethical values. Prochnik argues that Putnam’s influence is still felt today, e.g., in the popularity of M. Scott Peck’s blend of theology and psychology. Somewhat outside Prochnik’s purported scope and covered extensively by other writers are Freud’s differences with his European colleagues in the psychoanalytic movement; nevertheless, they are discussed here at considerable length.
A sprawling, unwieldy and uneven work.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-182-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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