While this book delivers an informative account of an important philosopher, it sometimes suffers from repetition.
A biography examines the 18th-century jurist Cesare Beccaria.
Beccaria, born in Milan in 1738, was the eldest son of an Italian aristocrat. Educated by Jesuits, the young noble went on to study law at the University of Pavia, emerging as a prominent man during the Age of Enlightenment. Although his name is not as well-remembered as Voltaire and Adam Smith, Beccaria made his own share of contributions to the advancement of modern thinking. As Bessler (Law/Univ. of Baltimore; The Death Penalty as Torture, 2017, etc.) explains, this book seeks to “restore Cesare Beccaria’s rightful place in the pantheon of the world’s most influential historical figures.” The main argument for Beccaria’s impact is his slender, though widely read, work published in 1764: Del Delitti e delle Pene (later translated into English as On Crimes and Punishments). His book argues against the use of torture and the death penalty in favor of more rational means for punishing criminals. While these may seem like obvious ideas to contemporary readers, Beccaria was writing at a time when state-mandated punishments were brutal. Jean Calas, a French merchant who met an excruciating end for allegedly murdering his son, was executed just two years before On Crimes and Punishments was circulated. Bessler argues that Beccaria’s work shaped not just European minds, but also many of the key figures of the American Revolution, including Dr. Benjamin Rush, who was “an undying and fervent Beccaria disciple.” Beccaria’s influence on the Enlightenment and American jurisprudence is an intriguing and engrossing historical trail to follow. The Founding Fathers did not create their own works out of thin air. Following the accomplishments of a lesser-known figure like Beccaria becomes a rewarding exercise for the audience. In skillfully sorting out the many ideas that led to documents with as much longevity as the Constitution, the author shows readers how much thought went into concepts that many take for granted. Few would argue that someone should be executed for stealing and yet, as the volume vividly illustrates, this was the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe. But other aspects of the book are a bit muddled. A number of specifics in Bessler’s text are repeated, sometimes within the space of two pages and occasionally over the course of chapters. Readers are told not once, but twice in the same paragraph, that Voltaire’s body was interred in the Pantheon in Paris. The execution of Calas and Voltaire’s interest in the case are explained early on and then again nearly 100 pages later. Such repetitions give the work an odd feel. And deciphering the chronology of events is not as simple as it should be. This disorganization may leave readers flummoxed by small details as broader points are being made.
While this book delivers an informative account of an important philosopher, it sometimes suffers from repetition.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61163-786-1
Page Count: 554
Publisher: Carolina Academic Press
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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