In a curiously lucid and compelling narrative, Althusser (1918-90), a distinguished neo-Marxist French intellectual, explains his life, philosophical career, politics, recurrent depressions, and therapies—and how, on the morning of November 16, 1980, he discovered that he'd strangled HÇläne, his wife and companion of 30 years. Having murdered the one person he could relate to—and on whom he totally depended—Althusser was confined, in spite of public outrage, to an insane asylum, deprived by his mental condition of a public trial and defense. Was he sleepwalking when he killed HÇläne, as Douglas Johnson improbably claims in an introduction? Was he acting on his wife's wishes, as Althusser says at one point, or was he in an ``intense and unforeseeable state of mental confusion,'' perhaps caused by antidepressants, as he claims at another? The motive is uncertain, but about Althusser's depressions there's no confusion: As he sees it, he spent the major part of his life—spawned by a missing father and an emotionally castrating mother—fathering himself (through philosophy) and fulfilling his mother's desires. Althusser traces a bizarre emotional choreography of alternating compliance and rebellion, seeing his immensely influential philosophy as a working out of childhood problems, with a subsequent fear of exposure as a fraud. He met HÇläne, eight years his senior, when he was nearly 30, and recently released from German prison camp. She became the first woman he would ever kiss, initiating a tumultuous sado-masochistic relationship between them. Meanwhile, leading French thinkers—Foucault, Lacan, Derrida- -briefly appear in the text, but Althusser, insulated by his self- preoccupation and misery, reveals little about them or the intellectual ferment of his times. A disturbing, demanding memoir that illustrates the alliance of genius and madness, the delusive clarity of which the insane are capable, and the enormous influence they can acquire over the thinking of others.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-56584-087-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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