After completing his doctoral dissertation on Peirce (1839- 1914), Brent (Intellectual History/University of the District of Columbia) waited 30 years to gain access to the private papers of the controversial founder of pragmatism and semiotics—papers that were suppressed by a Harvard faculty who believed they were protecting Peirce's intellectual reputation—and to write this biography. Trained as a scientist, Peirce was a versatile, eccentric genius, his reputation based on his lecturing on logic and philosophy at Johns Hopkins and Harvard. His major ambition was to articulate a method that explained all knowledge, including the origin of the universe. However grand this ambition and however rare his talent, Peirce was crippled, he believed, by a left- handedness that interfered with his linguistic abilities; by a painful facial neuralgia that he treated with opium and morphine; and by an erratic, volatile, possibly manic-depressive nature that he later decided was genetic. Brent explains this colorful, intense, dramatic personality through Baudelaire's archetype of the ``dandy''—self-invented, sensitive, arrogant, impulsive, original, vain, and extravagant. But Peirce was even more complex: Although Henry James befriended him, Peirce was, James said, ``a man of whom critics have never found anything good to say.'' A philosopher who thought metaphysics was ``moonshine,'' Peirce lost all his money on hopeless inventions such as ``electrolytic bleaching'' and on hapless schemes such as selling encyclopedias. At the very least, Peirce's hold on reality was tenuous, his life a series of bitter disappointments. Friendships, opportunities—even his fortunate second marriage to his mistress, the sickly but devoted Juliette- -and his refuge in an isolated estate held little joy, and his bright promise as a philosopher was never realized in his lifetime. It may be possible to offer more subtle and revealing readings of Peirce's character, but it would be hard to write a more sympathetic and eloquent one. (Thirty-five b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-253-31267-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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