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THE STORY I TELL MYSELF

A VENTURE IN EXISTENTIALIST AUTOBIOGRAPHY

The translation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness into English in 1955 was the first and perhaps most notable achievement of Barnes's long and scholarly career, on which she reflects in this autobiography. In tracing her career, she provides critical insight into the evolution of her own embrace of existentialism, the acceptance of challenge as the fertile ground of individual choice, as well as ``the experience of women who chose to pursue careers in the period between Virginia Woolf and Betty Friedan.'' Barnes traces her early fundamentalist Christian background and the way in which it naturally led to her interest in philosophy and ethics. This existentialist autobiography expresses her life as the natural outcome of an ongoing involvement with a philosophy that spoke not only to contemporary issues (racism, existential feminism, the right to die) but also to her own need to decry cynicism, to designate ``a legitimate goal for ethics,'' to exalt in what Sartre saw as the right to difference as one of the ingredients of commonality. Barnes describes poignantly the important intellectual trends that have captivated academia over the last four decades. With acrobatic flexibility, she expounds on Sartre and de Beauvoir, on deconstruction, on teaching as a career, and on life in Boulder, Colo. Her views of today's students are insightful, and her humane reflections on relationships (gay and otherwise) and aging are soothing, considering how far into the storm of philosophical life she has gazed. Barnes challenged every aspect of the life expected of her. She never married and has had a single female companion for most of her adult life. She has lived intimately with the universal questions of our century without losing sight of the stuff of daily life. While often overly detailed and at times academic, her autobiography does provide an intimate record of our times and of the ongoing issues that challenge us to define ourselves over and over again.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1997

ISBN: 0-226-03732-0

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Univ. of Chicago

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

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

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