Sartre, like Camus, has always been concerned with salvation. Both denied God and both were Catholic renegades. But Camus, seeking participation in life and reconciliation with nature, asserted man's right to happiness here and now. For Sartre, given the condition of the world, Camus' philosophy was merely sentimental or inspirational, an example of what he calls "bad faith." It is only by traveling in "the direction of History" that man's destiny can be realized. And for Sartre that meant the socialist future. Between Existentialism and Marxism, a collection of his most recent essays and interviews, emphasizes the dialectical turning point when existential or subjective awareness is heightened by neo-Marxian analysis, when the purely symbolic act enters the arena of real action, when universal values transcend individual consciousness. "How a man comes to politics, how he is caught by them, and how he is made other by them" — this defines Sartre's rocky journey. He tells us that "the Vietnamese are fighting for all men, and the Americans against all men," that "the machine cannot be repaired; the peoples of Eastern Europe must seize hold of it and destroy it," that the "duty of the Left" is to learn "to unite all the exploited to overthrow the old ossified structures" and thus attain the true revolution. In short, another version of the Absolute which Camus, of course, condemned, as tyranny, but which Sartre insists is the only path to freedom. Sartre's brilliance, however, is not to be seen in these cloudy ideological discussions, but rather in the three essays on Kierkegaard, Mallarme, and Tintoretto, striking and original pieces which inflame an otherwise ponderous book. Here he deals with the "quest for purification," the creative man's eternal task, makes concrete ideas which elsewhere are abstract, and in the celebration of Mallarme, in particular, writes with such power that he produces a sort of prose poem.
Pub Date: March 7, 1975
ISBN: 1844672077
Page Count: 302
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging, if sometimes spotty, history of the Jews who resided in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion from Spain in 1492 and from Portugal in 1497. A distinguished scholar and author of many books on modern Jewish history (A History of the Jews in America, 1992), Sachar has done little, if any, original research here, but he nicely synthesizes secondary sources. He shows how the late medieval Convivencia—the period of Jewish-Islamic mutual tolerance and cultural cross-fertilization—gave way to the nationwide pogroms of 1391, in which 30,000 Jews were killed (4,000 in Seville alone). Following this violence, the Inquisition that began in the late 15th century, and the expulsions, Sephardic Jews spread throughout the Mediterranean littoral and the Ottoman Empire, as well as to Holland, England, the Western Hemisphere (in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Inquisition's long arm pursued conversos—crypto- Jews who professed to be practicing Christians—to such places as Lima and Mexico City), and beyond. In almost every country where they settled, the Sephardim incorporated their pride in and yearning for Spain in a distinctive Jewish language, Ladino. Sachar's strengths include succinct and informative discussions of Sephardic communal and intellectual history, his excellent unfolding of the Inquisition's complex history, and his many colorful anecdotes of the Sephardic ``rich and famous.'' However, his coverage of the middle class and poor, of Sephardic women, and of the early modern period (16501850) is weak and, occasionally, embarrassingly clichÇd (he claims that ``by the eighteenth century, the Jews of Italy had become superstitious, neurotic, timorous''). Finally, he ``takes a stab'' at discussing the contemporary Sephardic communities of Israel and France (but not, puzzlingly, of the US, where about 200,000 Sephardim live), but this too is so brief as to be greatly inadequate. A more detailed and comprehensive history of Sephardic Jewry waits to be written. For now, Farewell Espa§a provides a quick introduction that, if a little light in terms of scholarship, contains a fluid and often fascinating narrative.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-40960-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lambent prose and a general lack of self-indulgence characterize these essays on the Catholic canon of saints. Each of the 20 contemporary authors whom FSG assistant editor Elie has assembled here centers his or her contribution on a particular holy man or woman—usually a saint for whom they were named or whom they have adopted as a patron. The Catholic experience predominates, but Elie intersperses other perspectives. After a serviceable introduction by Robert Coles, Bruce Bawer sets the pace with a fine essay on St. Francis of Assisi, artfully stitching a biographical account with a personal meditation on the lessons he teaches. Kathryn Harrison follows with a forceful tale of how her namesake, St. Catherine, inspired in her an anorectic self-abnegation. Literary types may be impressed by Richard Bausch's epiphany of Thomas Aquinas as paragon both of faith and of the modern spirit—achieved, Bausch lets us know, through the mediation of his friend Walker Percy. Francine Prose writes about Saint Teresa of vila by focusing on the seemingly unlikely notion of irony; Tobias Wolff, in contrast, presents a most straightforward saint, the adventurous Jean de BrÇbeuf, martyred among the North American Indians. Also in the Americas, Enrique Fern†ndez discusses Cuba's santer°a religion, an Afro-Caribbean form of saint worship that provides an interesting counterpoint to the more traditional Christianity under discussion elsewhere. Editor Elie builds a summa of sainthood around his recent encounter with the figure of Doubting Thomas, in the form of a Renaissance bronze of Thomas with Christ. A critique of the official Church sanction of canonization comes in Martin E. Marty's look at the still unsanctified Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. Valuable for inspiration, but also for information—the details of the lives and deaths of many saints are here, refracted through 20 idiosyncratic, often powerful points of view.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-100101-4
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© 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.
