Intellectual history as biography; and biography as the reconstruction from letters and diaries of the inner life and passions of a Jew disenfranchised on account of "infamous birth." As the center of a salon of Jewish intellectuals in Berlin, Rahel nee Levin was an arch-Romantic who championed Goethe, advising a friend to read him "as one read the Bible in distress." At a time when the fact that someone could be melancholy accredited him as a decent human being, Rahel wrote that "my assigned task was life" and threw herself into a series of improbable relationships with men that yielded misery, "higher suffering," and disgrace — that burden of disgrace that in the symbolism of her dream world was equivalent to Jewishness. Her fate was to unconsciously transmute (writes Arendt) "the attempt to assimilate, the effort to climb and to set one's house in order, into a love-affair." After her last-chance marriage in middle-age to a much younger, slightly boorish man of "priestly fidelity," she arrived: from Rahel Levin she converted to Friedrike Varnhagen von Ense — Christian, citizen, noblewoman, wife of a government official — only to discover that it had been just her exile and her unhappiness that made her what she was and gave her, in Arendt's words, "a place in the history of European humanity." An argument, then, against assimilation, completed, according to the author's preface, "when I left Germany in 1933." Arendt's insight into the psychology and the situation of pariah and parvenu is essential.
Pub Date: Oct. 23, 1974
ISBN: 0156761009
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1974
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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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