A book in which Kaag further carves out his niche in philosophy: personal, practical, and crucial.
A biography and exegesis of William James that serves as self-help for the philosophically inclined.
In his latest, Kaag (Philosophy/Univ. of Massachusetts, Lowell; Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are, 2018, etc.) notes that he began this book worse off than during his two previous philosophical memoirs. He was in the middle of a divorce, “had just watched my estranged, alcoholic father die,” and was spending much of his time in bed sleeping and reading James. That activity, however, isn’t a symptom of depression the way reading Schopenhauer might be. For Kaag, it proved to be a vital salve. “I think William James’s philosophy saved my life. Or, more accurately, it encouraged me to not be afraid of life.” If so, it wouldn’t be the first life James saved. His entire philosophy, writes the author, “from beginning to end, was geared to save a life, his life.” In this brief treatise, Kaag seeks to “offer the reader James’s existential life preserver.” This represents something of a formal departure for Kaag. Whereas American Philosophy and Hiking With Nietzsche were philosophical memoirs, this book is self-help philosophy that draws selectively from autobiography. This inversion makes it a more demanding text than its predecessors. If readers are to gather solace from James, it will come only from joining Kaag in thinking through his philosophy: responding to the challenge of scientific determinism; reflecting on the paradox of James’ famous assertion that “my first act of free will shall be to believe in free will”; and attempting to pluck the thorn of relativism from pragmatism’s side. Luckily, Kaag’s reading of James is as elucidating as readers have come to expect from him. Once again, he writes in a clear, focused, and winningly self-aware style that makes friends of James and himself for anyone who wonders if life is worth living.
A book in which Kaag further carves out his niche in philosophy: personal, practical, and crucial.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-691-19216-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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