A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment.
Crossing the divide between academic analysis and insightful storytelling, this social and intellectual history explores the ideas of pragmatism by charting the lives of its founding fathers.
Pragmatism, a philosophy that makes experience the decisive test of truth and rightness, has experienced a renaissance after the chill of Cold War decades, and Menand, a New Yorker staff writer and eminent scholar, counts as one of its latter-day midwives. Significantly, then, we are told that pragmatism (with its Emersonian overtones) came into being as a radical, progressive critique of the various philosophies that fueled the American Civil War. Pragmatism’s early proponents looked upon scientific or religious belief as “one of the pieces people try to bundle together with other pieces, like moral teachings and selfish interests and specific information, when they need to make a decision.” It was, therefore, a philosophy of method and process, of probability and function, and (when imbued with a constructive skepticism) it created common ground for cultivating democracy and pluralism over ideology. In his sharp and expansive appreciation of pragmatism’s formative quartet (Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, and John Dewey), Menand brings their intermingled lives into colorful focus: Holmes goes to war, James to Brazil, Peirce becomes homeless, and Dewey helps organize the American Association of University Professors. Each takes center stage in one of the story’s first four sections, forming a sequence of eclectic biographies that accumulate a narrative tension as lives and ideas cohere or clash. A fifth section measures pragmatism’s limitations as well as its role in modernizing American thought: it cannot, for example, explain why someone would be willing to die for his beliefs, but it represents the “intellectual triumph of unionism.”
A singular achievement of intellectual history as well as a weighty entertainment.Pub Date: May 23, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-19963-9
Page Count: 518
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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