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 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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