A provocative dual biography that sets out to recast Simone de Beauvoir as the ``true philosopher'' in her legendary relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre; by the Fullbrooks (she: Literary Studies/Univ. of the West of England; he: a freelance writer). This dry, clear, jargon-free analysis—based on the numerous earlier biographies—arrives after the stir caused by the publication of Beauvoir's Letters to Sartre (1992), which revealed her passionate relationships with women (as well as with men)- -relationships deliberately kept from public view. Beauvoir was Sartre's equal in her keeping of ``contingent'' relationships as the couple worked out what the Fullbrooks call ``a highly ambiguous desire for joint sexual imperialism.'' According to the authors, the terms of Beauvoir and Sartre's ``oath''—which allowed each to enjoy multiple liaisons—weren't what she settled for but, rather, ``the best he could get.'' But the Fullbrooks' more important point concerns Sartre's ``intellectual indebtedness'' to Beauvoir: They contend that the philosophical principles that he presented as his own in Being and Nothingness—the ``theory of appearances'' and other central ideas—were lifted from Beauvoir's novel She Came to Stay, a claim deriving from close textual analysis that convincingly extracts Sartre's thinking from the Beauvoir novel. The Fullbrooks cite Beauvoir's letters and The War Diaries of Jean- Paul Sartre (1985) to prove that Sartre had read the manuscript of She Came to Stay during his army leave in February 1940—earlier than he claimed. Throughout, the authors' attempt to ``shift'' the Beauvoir/Sartre ``balance'' delves only slightly into Sartre's work, although the couple's final three decades are summarized in an epilogue. Giving Beauvoir primary place in her relationship with Sartre is another step toward the ``correction'' of the legend of these existentialists—but far from the last word. (Meanwhile, a fully wrought vision of the complex and contradictory feminist can be found in Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir, 1990.)
Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1994
ISBN: 0-465-07827-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
A quirky wonder of a book.
A Peabody Award–winning NPR science reporter chronicles the life of a turn-of-the-century scientist and how her quest led to significant revelations about the meaning of order, chaos, and her own existence.
Miller began doing research on David Starr Jordan (1851-1931) to understand how he had managed to carry on after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake destroyed his work. A taxonomist who is credited with discovering “a full fifth of fish known to man in his day,” Jordan had amassed an unparalleled collection of ichthyological specimens. Gathering up all the fish he could save, Jordan sewed the nameplates that had been on the destroyed jars directly onto the fish. His perseverance intrigued the author, who also discusses the struggles she underwent after her affair with a woman ended a heterosexual relationship. Born into an upstate New York farm family, Jordan attended Cornell and then became an itinerant scholar and field researcher until he landed at Indiana University, where his first ichthyological collection was destroyed by lightning. In between this catastrophe and others involving family members’ deaths, he reconstructed his collection. Later, he was appointed as the founding president of Stanford, where he evolved into a Machiavellian figure who trampled on colleagues and sang the praises of eugenics. Miller concludes that Jordan displayed the characteristics of someone who relied on “positive illusions” to rebound from disaster and that his stand on eugenics came from a belief in “a divine hierarchy from bacteria to humans that point[ed]…toward better.” Considering recent research that negates biological hierarchies, the author then suggests that Jordan’s beloved taxonomic category—fish—does not exist. Part biography, part science report, and part meditation on how the chaos that caused Miller’s existential misery could also bring self-acceptance and a loving wife, this unique book is an ingenious celebration of diversity and the mysterious order that underlies all existence.
A quirky wonder of a book.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6027-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 1, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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