A solid, brass-tacks biography of the great American philosopher and founder of pragmatism. Though his ideas received substantial attention in their time, James has only come back into prominence, especially outside the US, with the onset of postmodernism. An age that despairs of fixed meaning finds a welcome resonance in James's belief that truth should rest upon utility and practicality. But Simon (The Biography of Alice B. Toklas, 1977, etc.) is not so interested in James the thinker as James the conflicted, suffering, frail, frustrated man. Her detailing of his childhood is particularly revealing. His father, a wealthy and neurotic erstwhile philosopher, kept the family constantly abroad, pulling James and his siblings out of any school where they seemed to be happily settling in. The existential expatriatism and ``philosophical hypochondria'' of this childhood left deep marks. For years, James struggled to find a focus acceptable to his father, moving, between breakdowns, from art to science to medicine. When he alighted at Harvard to teach at the medical school, he was by no means certain he'd found his mÇtier, and while he stayed put, he quickly moved from anatomy and physiology to psychology, ethics, and philosophy with an ease made possible only by his innate brilliance and the looser academic standards of the 19th century (James never even earned a Ph.D.). Very quickly, he began to enjoy enormous and lucrative success as a lecturer and public philosopher. However, as Chesterton once snidely observed, ``It was his glory that he popularized philosophy. It was his destruction that he popularized his own philosophy.'' Though a lifelong sufferer from those exotic 19th- century diseases now filed under the label of neurosis, James finally succumbed to the ultimate hypochondriac reward at the ripish age of 68. Simon does such a good job on James's life, one only wishes she'd spent a little more time on his ideas. (b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-193098-8
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1997
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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