A sympathetic, and meticulous account of the life and times of the psychoanalytic giant who mapped a progression of the individual’s lifetime development of identity. Historian Friedman (Indiana Univ.; Menninger: The Family and the Clinic, 1990, etc.) worked with Erikson, his wife, and their family and friends in the years directly preceding Erikson’s death in 1994; he also had access to reams of professional and private records. The goal is not so much theoretical analysis and critique, but rather to place the body of work in the context of Erikson’s own life. As Robert Coles points out in his foreword, Erikson made the connection between psychoanalysis and the social sciences of anthropology, biology, and history; he was a gifted writer whose complex ideas he was able to make clear to a multitude of readers, and his lifetime investigation of how each person constructs an identity is the foundation of our current understanding of the subject. Erikson’s journey would be a compelling enough tale on its own—moving between languages, religions, countries—even had it not generated such a body of work. Erikson never knew who his father was but supposed him to be a Danish gentile; his mother was Jewish. Part of Freud’s inner circle—Erikson was an analysand of Anna Freud—he and his wife left Europe as fascism was on the rise. They lived the rest of their lives moving about the US, where friends and correspondents as varied as Margaret Mead, Benjamin Spock, and Huey Newton helped shape Erikson’s views. Friedman early on puts his finger on a cardinal Erikson quality: in an age of enormous human tragedies, when —contemporaries often described a human condition of gloom, despair, and degradation. . . . Erikson was different. His words and presence signaled hope and possibility despite the enormity of modern human tragedies.— High points (professional acclaim and satisfaction in helping others) and low (professional snarls, family tragedies), Friedman chronicles it all in careful detail. A complicated life, respectfully examined. (8 pages b&w photos)
Pub Date: May 5, 1999
ISBN: 0-684-19525-9
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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