Kaag's lively prose, acute self-examination, unfolding romance, and instructive history of philosophy as a discipline make...
A compelling hybrid combining memoir, a dramatic narrative about saving an endangered rare book collection, and the intellectual history of philosophy.
Previously the author of academic tomes (Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition, 2014, etc.), Kaag (Philosophy/Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell) recognized a path to writing about philosophy for a general audience by building the story around his unexpected discovery of perhaps 10,000 books in a neglected building on the rural New Hampshire estate of William Ernest Hocking, a deceased Harvard University philosophy professor, and his wife. The first time Kaag entered the estate guided by an acquaintance, he viewed the cohesive collection of rare books in an unsecured building via trespassing. Later, Kaag received permission from the Hocking daughters, who had never cataloged the rare book collection painstakingly built by their parents. The author’s discovery came at a juncture of severe personal depression as a postdoctoral scholar at Harvard. His problematic father had died, his youthful marriage was unraveling, and he was obsessed with the question "Is life worth living?" presented most vividly by William James, “the father of American psychology and philosophy.” By throwing himself into the salvation of the invaluable Hocking collection, Kaag found an affirmative answer to the question, grappled with the death of his sometimes-hated father, filed for divorce, and, as a touching bonus, fell in love with a female academic colleague who had also divorced. That colleague, Carol Hay, joined Kaag on the New Hampshire estate to help save the rare books. Kaag and Hay married in 2011 and later became parents. Some of the books sold at auctions, and others were donated to libraries and archives with climate controls to aid preservation. Throughout the book, the author deftly intertwines the narrative threads in a story perfect for book lovers and soul searchers alike.
Kaag's lively prose, acute self-examination, unfolding romance, and instructive history of philosophy as a discipline make for a surprisingly absorbing book.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-15448-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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