A meditative work full of self-understanding that will resonate with anyone who has ever been drawn toward the void.
A philosopher’s journey into the life, writings, and mountains of Nietzsche—and ultimately into himself.
Nietzsche makes for a challenging hiking companion, not least for nonfiction writers, who risk having their own stories and prose overshadowed by comparison. Or, to follow this book’s central metaphor, it is a challenge, once you set off with him, not to let Nietzsche carry the load. Kaag (Philosophy/Univ. of Massachusetts Lowell; American Philosophy: A Love Story, 2016, etc.) succeeds on this account through his courage to approach Nietzsche, and philosophy in general, from a personal—and not just intellectual—perspective. This allows Nietzsche to play a supportive role in Kaag’s project of becoming. The author follows Nietzsche, for whom the “point of historical study was to enrich the present moment of experience.” The philosopher trekked the mountains “to tread on the edge of the void.” Kaag’s present consists of a return trip to Sils Maria, Switzerland, where he had spent an intense period in his youth hiking, fasting, and reading Nietzsche, this time with his wife and young daughter. At the time, it wasn’t clear exactly what he was hoping to find the second time around, but as he wandered the Alps and continued to read Nietzsche—he provides helpful summaries and analyses—he approached a significant psychic breaking point. The connection between philosophy and the author’s life is not as seamless as it is in American Philosophy, but this is due in part to a difficulty of his subject. More than any other philosopher, Nietzsche asks not to be read as much as confronted. His writing is a challenge to us to become our true selves. That Kaag meets this challenge by determining his own ideals is all the proof needed to confirm that he chose the right companion for his journey.
A meditative work full of self-understanding that will resonate with anyone who has ever been drawn toward the void.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-17001-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
